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Anthony Weston is an American philosopher, teacher, and writer. He is author of widely-used primers in critical thinking and ethical practice and has written a variety of unconventional books and essays on philosophical topics.

Life
Weston was born in 1954 and grew up in the Sand County region of southwestern Wisconsin, country identified with the conservationist Aldo Leopold (in his Sand County Almanac) and the architectural and visionary Frank Lloyd Wright, a strong influence on his family. He is a 1976 Honors graduate of Macalester College, and received his PhD in Philosophy in 1982 from the University of Michigan, where he wrote his PhD dissertation with Frithjof Bergmann on “The Subjectivity of Values”. He taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook for ten years, and subsequently in Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Elon University, where he has won the University's premiere awards for both teaching and scholarship. He has taught abroad in Costa Rica, Western Australia, and British Columbia. Weston and his partner Amy Halberstadt have two children and are active in urban agriculture in Durham, North Carolina.

Philosophy
Weston’s philosophical project as a whole advances an expansive “toolbox” for critical, creative, and constructive thinking, especially for purposes of social and environmental re-imagination and pragmatic ethical practice. The social, ethical, even ontological problems that we so often take as “given” are often, he argues, products of underlying conditions, practices, and choices. This view may be identified with deconstruction, but too often, Weston argues,


 * the genuine promise of this critical move is betrayed by the thinnest of follow-ups. We need to give the same kind of attention to the re-construction of genuinely better alternatives in the new space of freedom that broadly deconstructive moves create. (”A 21st Century Philosophical Toolbox”, Keynote address for the Atlantic Region Philosophers Association Conference, 10/16/09)

This reconstructive project calls on a set of skills and concepts less often recognized and valued in philosophy. Inspired in particular by the pragmatic social philosophy of John Dewey, Weston envisions open-ended and experimental thinking, modeled on crafts such as building or performance and empirical science, gradually displacing more category-bound and formal thinking. In a variety of essays and books he lays out key concepts such as “the hidden possibilities of things” – the sense that the world as it appears has much more depth and possibility than it may seem – and correlatively the need to thematize and resist ‘’self-validating reduction’’, the process by which some being or some part of the world are reduced to less than they might be, and then that very reduction is taken as an excuse and validation for itself, the obliterated possibilities now thoroughly out of view. Correspondingly, the task of knowing and valuing is not to "read off" the nature and possibility of things off the world as it is “given”, but to actively engage the world, to “venture the trust”, as he puts it, to create new kinds of openings in interaction with the world within which deeper possibilities might emerge.

Settled modes of value issue in the familiar ethics, of persons for example, but the “originary” areas of ethics, as Weston calls them, are only now taking shape, not a matter of extension or “application” of pre-given principles but rather the co-creation or co-constitution of new values. In environmental ethics in particular, Weston argues that we stand at the very beginning of our exploration. At the same time, he also argues for a “multicentric” approach to reconstituting the human relation to the more-than-human world, as opposed to the “mono-centrism” that could either be human-centered (anthropocentric) or larger-than-human but still “centered” in the sense that one dimension and model for values determines who or what morally “counts” and why.

Another key theme is the centrality of the built and lived world to the shaping of thought – as well as vice versa. Philosophers tend to assume a one-way connection: that thought determines world – while philosophy’s critics, doctrinaire Marxists for example, see it just the other way around. In Weston’s view the connection goes both ways, and is genuinely dialectical. A world or a set of concrete practices represent the enactment of certain ideas, but they also shape our ideas in turn. The cultural enactment and perpetuation of anthropocentrism is one good example. But this is, in his view, a good thing, and a necessary one: it gives thought an anchor, allows us to work out ideas concretely, and gives us a lever for change as well: by actually, physically changing the world. Once again, the world as it is is not somehow the limit of possibility.


 * The world shapes our concepts but does not determine them; likewise our concepts shape our thought but do not determine it. The upshot is conceptual room to move. Rather than analyzing concepts as if they were fixed read-offs of reality, we can reshape and relocate them, and by so doing remake thought and the world itself. (”A 21st Century Philosophical Toolbox”)

Finally, just as ethical practice becomes intelligent, creative, critical engagement with problematic situations and possibilities rather than “puzzle-solving”, so even the widely-taught and conventional field of critical thinking becomes something more than a matter of testing someone else’s arguments for “fallacies”, but rather a constructive and open-ended process of framing one’s own arguments and charitably recasting and exploring others’ lines of thought.


 * Philosophy is itself a mode of world-making. We need to embrace philosophy as an experimental and invitational mode of practice in that light.

Weston has called his overall project “Pragmatopian”, adapting Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s term for the project of her visionary novels: radical but experimental utopias. Philosophy as he tries to practice it, Weston has said, is a kind of “pragmatopian dare”.

Critical Thinking

 * A Rulebook for Arguments (Hackett Publishing Company, 1986; 4th edition, 2009, ISBN 0872209547) now in its 4th edition and translated into ten languages: this critical-thinking handbook is Weston's best known book.


 * A Workbook for Arguments, co-authored with David Morrow (Hackett Publishing Company, 2011, ISBN 1603845496). Textbook expansion of Rulebook.


 * Creativity for Critical Thinkers (Oxford University Press, 2007; ISBN 019530621X)

Ethics

 * Toward Better Problems (Temple University Press, 1992, ISBN 0877229481), a systematic attempt at Deweyan reconstruction in contemporary ethics.


 * A Practical Companion To Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1997; 4th edition, 2011 ISBN 019973058X). A short guide to "the basic attitudes and skills that make ethics work".


 * A 21st Century Ethical Toolbox (Oxford University Press, 2001; 3rd edition, 2012; ISBN 0195309677). A full-scale textbook for ethics in a pragmatic key.


 * Creative Problem-Solving in Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2007; ISBN 0195306201)

Environmentalism

 * Back to Earth: Tomorrow's Environmentalism (Temple University Press, 1994, ISBN 1566392373). An attempt to recover the experience of life among other-than-human beings and within nature that grounds our ethical engagement with them.


 * Editor, An Invitation to Environmental Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1999, ISBN 0195122046), with essays by David Abram, Val Plumwood, Holmes Rolston III, and Jim Cheney, with Preface and "Going On" sections as well a companion essay by Weston.


 * The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher: Essays on the Edges of Environmental Ethics (State University of New York Press, ISBN 0791476693). A collection of some of Weston's key essays in the field from essays from the professional literature.


 * Mobilizing the Green Imagination: An Exuberant Manifesto (New Society Publishers, 2012, ISBN 0865717095). "Elegant and audacious possibilities that push the boundaries of contemporary environmentalism".

Social philosophy

 * Jobs for Philosophers (Xlibris, 2004; ISBN 1413440096) is a collection of reviews of books on themes such as “reinventing the culture”, the “natural history of values”, and “de-anthropocentrizing the world”. These books actually don’t exist (except for the first, which is a review of Jobs for Philosophers itself). The title is a play on the American Philosophical Association’s newsletter for academic positions in philosophy.
 * How to Re-Imagine the World: A Pocket Handbook for Practical Visionaries (New Society Publishers, 2007; ISBN 0865715947)

Selected essays
Weston has written over fifty essays and reviews in the above fields as well as others such as philosophy of education and the philosophy of space exploration. Some of the more noted and often-reprinted of these are (original appearances only):


 * "Beyond Intrinsic Value: Pragmatism in Environmental Ethics", Environmental Ethics 7:4 (1985): 321-339.


 * "Forms of Gaian Ethics", Environmental Ethics 9:3 (1987): 121-134.


 * "Radio Astronomy as Epistemology: Some Philosophical Reflections on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence", Monist 71:1 (1988): 88-100.


 * "Uncovering the 'Hidden Curriculum': A Laboratory Course in Philosophy of Education", APA Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy 90:2 (Winter 1991): 36-40.


 * A Liberatory/Laboratory Course in Philosophy of Education, Resource Paper Series, National Society for Experiential Education, 1992.


 * "Non-anthropocentrism in a Thoroughly Anthropocentrized World", The Trumpeter 8:3 (1991): 108-112.


 * "Before Environmental Ethics", Environmental Ethics 14 (1992): 323-340.


 * “Self-Validating Reduction: Toward a Theory of the Devaluation of Nature”, Environmental Ethics 18 (1996): 115-132.


 * “Instead of Environmental Education”, in Bob Jickling, ed., Proceedings of the Yukon College Symposium on Ethics, Environment, and Education (Whitehorse, Y.T.: Yukon College, 1996).


 * “Risking Philosophy of Education”, Metaphilosophy 29 (1998): 145-158.


 * “Environmental Ethics as Environmental Etiquette: Toward an Ethics-Based Epistemology in Environmental Philosophy” (with Jim Cheney), Environmental Ethics 21 (1999): 115-134.


 * “Multi-Centrism: A Manifesto”, Environmental Ethics 26 (2004): 25-40.

Criticism
Three general types of criticism have been raised in response to Weston’s work.

First, critics argue that Weston’s notions of “originary ethics” and “reconstructive engagement” offer little or no concrete guidance, especially in less than optimal situations in which choices nonetheless must be made. Though Weston has challenged what he has called “dilemma-ism” as a method of doing ethics or as an expectation about the necessary structure of ethical problems, it may be argued that sometimes we do have genuine dilemmas that need to be addressed. Weston’s commitment to opening up new possibilities may also open up a range of problematic and even disturbing possibilities as well. Aren't some more definite and defended limits necessary?

Second, when philosophy becomes a species of imagination and improvisation and engagement, it is not clear that it retains any (or enough) distinctive professional identity. Although officially Weston has been a professor of philosophy for his entire professional life, much of his actual teaching and writing has been in interdisciplinary settings or beyond: he has co-taught with biologists and ecologists (early on, for example, the late Lawrence Slobodkin at Stony Brook) and now splits his time between Philosophy and Environmental Studies Departments at Elon, working as well with astronomers, Zen masters and in environmental education programs as well as on social change projects. It’s unclear whether he is really a philosopher or more like a polymath who has made a tenured position in philosophy a comfortable home for somewhat "undisciplined" adventurings.

Third, Weston’s works have agendas: his textbooks in particular take substantive but not systematically defended positions in ethical philosophy. Weston's response seems to be that any practical textbook necessarily does so. The usual textbooks are just less evidently substantive because the substance tends to be the taken-for-granted norms. Weston’s method seems to be to try to reconstruct certain fields the long way around, by rewriting their textbooks, modeling a quite different approach in practice and therefore inviting new kinds of students into the field and perhaps also reshaping their teachers’ views without arguing in the usual way against the assumed norms.