J. Baird Callicott (born 1941) is an American philosopher whose work has been at the forefront of the new field of environmental philosophy and ethics. He is a University Distinguished Research Professor and a member of the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies and the Institute of Applied Sciences at the University of North Texas.Faculty | Philosophy & Religion Studies Callicott held the position of Professor of Philosophy and Natural Resources at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point from 1969 to 1995, where he taught the world's first course in environmental ethics in 1971.Ouderkirk, Wayne and Jim Hill, eds. (2002) Land, Value, Community: Callicott and Environmental Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, page 344. . From 1994 to 2000, he served as vice president then president of the International Society for Environmental Ethics. Other distinguished positions include visiting professor of philosophy at Yale University; the University of California, Santa Barbara; the University of Hawaiʻi; and the University of Florida.My real CV - J. Baird Callicott
Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac is one of environmental philosophy's seminal texts, and Callicott is widely considered to be the leading contemporary exponent of Leopold's land ethic.Ouderkirk and Hill (2002) Callicott's book In Defense of the Land Ethic (1989) explores the intellectual foundations of Leopold's outlook and seeks to provide it with a more complete philosophical treatment; and a following publication titled Beyond the Land Ethic (1999) further extends Leopold's environmental philosophy. Callicott's Earth's Insights (1994) is also considered an important contribution to the budding field of comparative environmental philosophy; a special edition of the journal Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion (Volume 1, Number 2) was devoted to scholarly reviews of the work.Publisher's website: http://www.brill.nl/product_id9007 Callicott is co-Editor-in-Chief with Robert Frodeman of the award-winning, two-volume A-Z Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, published by Macmillan in 2009. He is also author of numerous journal articles and book chapters in environmental philosophy and has served as editor or co-editor of many books, textbooks, and reference works in the same field.
Biography Callicott was born in Memphis, Tennessee on May 9, 1941, to distinguished regional artist and art instructor Burton H. Callicott (1907–2003), of the Memphis Academy of Arts (now Memphis College of Art).Unless otherwise indicated, biographical information taken from Callicott's personal webpage, available at: http://jbcallicott.weebly.com/index.html In 1959, Callicott graduated from Memphis's then racially segregated Messick High School and attended Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College), earning a B.A. in philosophy with Honors in 1963. He received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for graduate study at Syracuse University, completing his M.A. in philosophy (1966) and his doctorate in the same field (1972) after earning a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship. His dissertation, titled Plato's Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Theory of Forms, drew from the concentration of his undergraduate and graduate work: ancient Greek philosophy.
Callicott began his career as an academic philosopher in 1966 at Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis). There, as faculty advisor to the Black Students Association, he was active in the Southern Civil Rights Movement during the time of Martin Luther King Jr.’s last campaigns in the area. In 1969, Callicott joined the philosophy department of Wisconsin State University-Stevens Point (now the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point). As "an expatriate Southerner, fresh from the pitched battles of the Civil Rights struggle in Memphis, Tennessee," Callicott believed that "the environment was under wholesale assault from every direction with no surcease in sight" and that "Civil Rights was a cause already won in the republic of ideas and in the courts (if not on Main Street in Memphis)."Callicott, J. Baird (1987a). "Preface." Pages vii-viii in J. Baird Callicott, ed. Companion to A Sand County Almanac: Interpretive and Critical Essays. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. . He "was a concerned citizen, but [he] was also, more particularly, a challenged philosopher."(Callicott, 1987a) So Callicott asked "how, as a philosopher, [he] could contribute to a rethinking of human nature and a reconstruction of human values to help bring them into line with the relatively new ideas about the nature of the environment emerging from ecology and the new physics."
For 26 years, Callicott lived and taught in the northern reaches of Wisconsin's sand counties, located on the Wisconsin River, just ninety miles from Aldo Leopold's storied shack and John Muir's first homestead on Fountain Lake, the region that stirred the souls of two very influential environmental thinkers. Callicott writes that “the landscape that had helped shape and inspire the nascent evolutionary-ecological thought of the youthful Muir and that of the mature Leopold was the perfect setting for (me) to inaugurate (my) life-long vocation as a founder of academic environmental philosophy.”J. Baird Callicott - Home In 1995, he joined the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies at the University of North Texas in Denton. The first graduate program in environmental philosophy had been launched at UNT in 1990 under the aegis of Eugene C. Hargrove, then department chair and founding editor of the journal Environmental Ethics. The addition of Callicott's expertise helped cement its standing as the world's leading program in the field.
Philosophy Callicott's environmental ethic "I set out, as a philosopher, to work as a peer to the moral philosophers of the past, to create something new under the philosophical sun — under the gaze of Apollo, as it were — 'a new, an environmental ethic,' such as Richard Routley had warranted in 1973."Introductory Palinode - J. Baird Callicott
In accordance with Leopold's oft-quoted dictum — "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise"Leopold, Aldo (1949). A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press. . — Callicott espouses a holistic, non-anthropocentric environmental ethic. What he labels the “extensionist” approach to environmental ethics attempts to extend familiar anthropocentric ethical paradigms — legacies of the European Enlightenment — to other-than-human beings. Peter Singer's "animal liberation," for example, extends Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian ethical paradigm to all sentient animals.Singer, Peter (1975). Animal Liberation: A New Ethic for Our Treatment of Animals. New York: New York Review. . Paul W. Taylor's "biocentrism" extends the Kantian deontological paradigm to all "teleological centers of life" (i.e. all organisms).Taylor, Paul W. (1986) Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. . Extensionist approaches, however, are inveterately individualistic, conferring “moral considerability” on individual organisms. Actual environmental concerns, however, focus on transorganismic entities: endangered species; threatened biotic communities and ecosystems; rivers and lakes; the ocean and atmosphere. Callicott believes that an adequate environmental ethic — an environmental-ethics paradigm that addresses actual environmental concerns — must be holistic.
Callicott traces the conceptual foundations of the Leopold land ethic first back to Charles Darwin's analysis of the "moral sense" in the Descent of Man and ultimately to David Hume's grounding of ethics in the "moral sentiments" espoused in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.Callicott, J. Baird (1987b). "The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic." Pages 186-217 in J. Baird Callicott, ed. Companion to A Sand County Almanac: Interpretive and Critical Essays. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. . Hume argues that moral actions and moral judgments are based on such other-oriented sentiments as sympathy, beneficence, loyalty, and patriotism.Hume, David (1751). An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. London: A. Millar. . Darwin argues that these “moral sentiments” evolved as the sine qua non of social (or communal) solidarity, on which depends the survival and reproductive success of the individual members of society (or community).Darwin, Charles (1871). The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1st ed.). London: John Murray. . The tradition of dichotomous thinking in Western philosophy inclines most philosophers to dismiss Hume's ethics as a kind of irrational emotivism, despite the fact that, Callicott believes, Hume clearly provides a key role for reason in moral action and judgment. The faculty of reason, according to Hume, determines (1) relations of ideas, which are essentially logical relationships; and (2) matters of fact.Hume, David (1740). Treatise of Human Nature, Bk III, Part I. Section I. London: John Noon. . Among such matters of fact, reason both traces the often complex causal chain of the consequences of various actions and discloses the proper objects of the moral sentiments. Accordingly, Leopold also traces both the causal chain of ecological consequences of such seemingly innocent actions as tilling the soil and grazing cattle and discloses a proper object of those moral sentiments — such as loyalty and patriotism — which are excited by social membership and community identity.Leopold, Sand County; and Flader, S. L. and J. Baird Callicott, eds. (1999). The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. . That proper object of such sentiments is the “biotic community,” revealed by the relatively new science of ecology.
Intrinsic value in Nature