Sino-British-American Summer School of Philosophy

2019 SESSION

Environmental Philosophy
East China Normal University, Shanghai
22 July – 6 August

Please recommend this year’s summer school on “Environmental Philosophy” to your students
and friends:

Sino-British-American Summer School of Philosophy, July 22 – August 6, 2019, will be hosted

by East China Normal University in Shanghai.

The Summer School was founded in 1988 by the Institute of Philosophy (Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences), Royal Institute of Philosophy (UK), the China Institute of Oxford University. It
had its first session in 1988 (Peter Strawson was one of the four teachers), and the summer of
2019 marks its 23rd session. The application deadline is May 17th. For details about how to
apply, please see:

http://philosophy.cssn.cn/jxjy/zymsqzxy/201904/t20190416_4865121.shtml

We admit 60 students; among them, 40 are “members” and 20 are “auditors”. The students who
attend the summer school are usually undergraduate students, graduate students, as well as
university teachers. Everything will be in English. We usually have four specific themes
(courses) and four teachers.

For details of the four courses and the readings, please see the other document “2019 Philosophy
Summer School Course Plans”.

As the director of the Summer School 2019, I’d like to say a few words about two unique
features of these four courses and the four teachers.

The first is that, as one can see from the course plans, these teachers will not teach
“environmental philosophy” as “applied philosophy” or “applied ethics” or “applied
metaphysics”. Rather, all of the four teachers believe that we should see our environmental crisis
as implying a “crisis in philosophy”, which means that we must rethink and reconceptualize
philosophy. In these four courses, we will be trying to imagine what philosophy might become in
the future. I believe the Summer School in 2019 will turn out to be an exception to the rule,
which is that “environmental philosophy” is usually perceived to be a practically important but
philosophically boring and uninspiring topic. In other words, we will try to do “environmental
philosophy” as philosophy, and try to do philosophy as thinking without a banister.

The second unique feature of the Summer School in 2019 is that the four teachers come from
very diverse philosophical traditions and backgrounds, and at the same time they also draw upon
Indian and Chinese philosophical traditions. Freya Mathews is An Australian philosopher who is
an expert on Spinoza, panpsychism, and ecological metaphysics. Her course is based on a book
on ecological civilization, which she has been working on. Her sources of inspiration include
Spinoza, biology, ecology, and Daoism. William Edelglass and Colette Sciberras are experts on
Buddhism and environmental philosophy. Edelglass also works on continental philosophy
(Heidegger, Levinas). He has been articulating an exciting synthesis of continental philosophy,
Buddhism, and environmental philosophy. Sciberras is a young philosopher, one of the first ones
who have written their dissertations on Buddhism and environmental philosophy (her advisor is
Simon James at Durham University who has written the first monograph on Buddhist
environmental philosophy). The course I’ll be teaching is a shorter version of a course I have
been teaching at Kenyon College, which is called “The Anthropocene as a Philosophical
Problem”. In this course we try to image what an “eco-philosophy” or “geo-philosophy” might
be like.

Yang Xiao
Kenyon College