My trip to Cincinnati and the conference on *Engineering Towards a More Just and Sustainable World* was most productive and provocative. Combining mostly academics from the engineering and the philosophy world is bound to be fascinating, and this event was indeed. My presentation was designed to make the concept of sustainability clearer than it is in normal conversation within either of these two communities. The same can be said of any mixture of a profession based on positivism and on some sense of determinism, that is, the world can be described by some sort of model and associated sets of… Read More
Continue ReadingAway for a Few Days to Discuss How Sustainability Impacts Engineering
I’m off for a couple of days to participate in a mini conference on “Engineering Towards a More Just and Sustainable World,” sponsored by the National Academy of Engineers in Cincinnati (my old home town). It’s part of a larger meeting–The Nineteenth Annual meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. I’m excited to see such an august institution take up this daunting issue.
Continue ReadingWhere’s the Care in the Health “Care” Debate?
As long as I have rediscovered the centrality of care to sustainability, I will continue for a few posts. I have been teaching a course at the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement focussed on the writing of Alfred North Whitehead and now a brief tour of Martin Heidegger. There is quite a bit in common between the two. Both are trying to explain how meaningful objects show up, rather than our seeing nothing but atoms and empty space. The other commonality is that both are so dense as to make reading a huge chore. Fortunately we are using a… Read More
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