The Enlightenment is not a nightmare, nor is it something that comes easily to us. It is an aspiration - and a good one! Dale Jamieson More Quotes by Dale Jamieson More Quotes From Dale Jamieson I played with English and Sociology in college but dropped out to work in the anti-war movement. I was going around denouncing the Viet Nam war as immoral but one day it dawned on me that I didn't know what that meant. I signed up for an ethics class at San Francisco State to find out the answer. Dale Jamieson college class war I became religious and at 14 went to a boarding school 500 miles from home to begin theological studies. By the time I started university, politics had replaced religion in the economy of my enthusiasms but I had no idea what to study. My boarding school emphasized languages which I was bad at, and deemphasized math and science which I was good at. Dale Jamieson religious home school The density of human population combined with the development of powerful and largely unconstrained technology has given us the problems of the anthropocene and the serious possibility of self-caused extinction. Dale Jamieson technology powerful self We need to use economic instruments such as carbon taxes, cap and trade, tax and dividend and whatever else to help incentivize behavior that will move us to a post-carbon, post-animal agriculture world, and make our societies more resilient to the shocks that are already baked into the system. But that doesn't make climate change an "economic issue." Dale Jamieson agriculture animal moving Our traditional systems of decision-making are just not up to preventing changes in fundamental earth systems that are driven by a constant barrage of individually negligible emissions of an invisible, odorless gas, by billions of people all over the world. Dale Jamieson decision fundamentals people It's true that climate change is an unprecedented problem so it's not surprising that it's so difficult to address. Dale Jamieson addresses climate problem When it comes to climate change it's all the usual barriers: greed, mendacity, ignorance, short-sightedness and so on, manifest in the extreme power of corporations, the weakness of government, and the indifference of citizens. Dale Jamieson greed government ignorance If we don't have historical consciousness we can't really understand problems in all their dimensions, and if we can't understand problems than we can't find solutions. Dale Jamieson dimensions historical problem We know the "great men" and a handful of heavily cited papers in our specialization. When there is a historical frame around a paper it's often a caricature that has become canonical. Dale Jamieson historical paper men Even those who specialize in the history of philosophy often ignore the political and cultural context, and the natural world in which their philosophers were philosophizing. This has consequences both trivial and important. If you systematically read the last fifty years of the major journals in our discipline you would be amazed at the amount of redundancy. Most of this is unacknowledged because most of us know so little about the history of our discipline and even the subfields in which we work. Dale Jamieson discipline philosophy years We think of history as another specialization, like philosophy of language, rather than as something that informs everything we do and think. Dale Jamieson language philosophy thinking People with long memories and a vivid sense of the past have an immediate understanding of politicians like Donald Trump. They are not surprised by the behavior of Google, a corporation that notionally (until recently anyway) espoused the slogan "don't be evil" and then runs over individual people and even entire nations in the pursuit of profit. Dale Jamieson running memories past One of the real dangers of our time is people's indifference to history. Dale Jamieson indifference real people We live in a world in which everyone wants solutions. But we can't find solutions if we don't understand the problems, and we can't understand the problems without knowing how we got here. Dale Jamieson knowing want world Aristotle thought that humans are rational animals and Hobbes thought that we act on the basis of rational self-interest. If only! It's not that we never do these things, it's that they are hardly constituative of who and what we are. Dale Jamieson hobbes self animal I'm a subjectivist about morality. Dale Jamieson morality We're highly adaptable and have developed some powerful systems of representation. Dale Jamieson adaptable representation powerful We're not good at noticing slow, steady changes in our environments, our senses are not very acute compared to those of many animals, and we're pretty awful at abstract thought, much less acting on it. Dale Jamieson awful acting animal We're good at noticing sudden movements of middle size objects in our immediate visual field, but what is out of sight is for us is largely out of mind. Dale Jamieson movement sight mind I take seriously the idea that we are African Apes who (at least for the moment) dominate the planet, but our psychology is pretty much what it was when we were living in small groups on the savanna. Dale Jamieson psychology groups ideas