Faculty Pub Night: Brian Treanor

The third Pub Night of Fall 2014 features Brian Treanor, Professor of Philosophy, Daum Professor, and Director of Environmental Studies.

Despite its ancient roots, virtue ethics has only recently been fully appreciated as a resource for environmental philosophy. Fundamental to virtue ethics is an acknowledgment that neither good ethical rules nor good intentions are effective absent the character required to bring them to fulfillment.

Brian Treanor builds on recent work on virtue ethics in environmental philosophy, finding an important grounding in the narrative theory of philosophers like Paul Ricoeur and Richard Kearney. Character and ethical formation, Treanor argues, are intimately tied to our relationship with the narratives through which we view the human place in the natural world. By reframing environmental questions in terms of individual, social, and environmental narratives about flourishing, Emplotting Virtue offers a powerful vision of how we might remake our character so as to live more happily, more sustainably, and more virtuously in a diverse, beautiful, wondrous, and fragile world.