public lecture

Professor James Hatley

Earth without End:
False Eternities and the Mortal Future of the Human Species


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Hatley’s lecture takes up the question of how not only human individuals but also our species as a whole is mortal. He explores how the unfettered assumption of the eternity of the human leads to ethical and metaphysical bad faith in confronting an era of extinction.





James Hatley is Professor of Philosophy and a faculty affiliate in Environmental Studies at Salisbury University in Maryland.  Born and raised on the high plains of Montana in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, he studied art, worked with developmentally disabled adults and taught high school English before taking up his graduate studies in philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  Influenced by the poetry of Paul Celan and the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Hatley wrote Suffering Witness, published in 2000.  The book addresses the responsibility to remember the Holocaust, particularly as this obligation surfaced in the classrooms of Hatley’s students reading about that event. He has more recently edited a book of essays on the ethical significance of embodiment in the thought of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.  He is currently working on a book of essays with two other scholars to be titled The Faces of Nature: Environmental Philosophy and Emmanuel Levinas. Hatley helped to found the Society for Continental Philosophy in a Jewish Context, as well as the Society for Nature in Philosophy and Religion.  During the last decade Hatley has taken up again the mantle of artist and regularly exhibits his work in environmental sculpture.


Flyer for event: "Earth without end"


This lecture was presented on Friday 10 July 2009 at Macquarie University, Sydney.