Abstract

Throughout the humanities, and in my own discipline of philosophy in particular, our subject matter is systems of understanding, the very frameworks through which we think. Without some reference to hard evidence, new discoveries in research, ideas that do not conform to historically accepted standards are dismissed as crazy. A great deal of intellectual effort is spent, I think needlessly, on building arguments advocating that the new idea be considered seriously, critiques of the old order of thought. So much energy is often spent on arguments for consideration, that the advocates of a new idea are exhausted and retired by the time their ideas are accepted as relevant to their field. There is no energy left in the academic community to explore all that the new concept can do. Ecological philosophy is my major example in this presentation of the phenomenon I describe.