Volume 17, Issue 1, Fall 2012
Ethics, Indifference, and Social Concern
Ladelle McWhorter
Pages 39-54
Whatever Is Hardest
Charles Scott's Practice of Thinking
Charles Scott has always encouraged his students to take up the questions they find most troubling, difficult, and even possibly unanswerable. For him, philosophy is about movements of thinking themselves rather than arrival at reasonable conclusions. In tribute to Scott as a teacher, this paper takes up a troubling and perhaps unanswerable question: How might we teach our students today so as to prepare them for life in a world of ecological instability beyond what any member of our species has ever experienced? It looks at the question of ethics in the midst of pollution, peak oil, and climate change.