Dr. James D. Hatley
Professor of Environmental Studies
Faculty Affiliate in Philosophy
Department of Environmental Studies
Fulton School of Liberal Arts
Salisbury University
Salisbury, Maryland 21801
Office:
Perdue Building, Room 222
Telephone: 410-677-5072; Fax:
Email: jdhatley@salisbury.edu
Senior
Seminar Fall 2013: Thinking Species Extinction Locally and Globally
After
twenty years at Salisbury University in the philosophy department, I have now
been reassigned to environmental studies, a department I played an active role
in establishing. My specialty is in
20th Century Continental Philosophy, with an emphasis on the thought
of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In my work on environmental philosophy,
I also focus on the American personalist tradition,
which includes thinkers such as Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Henry Bugbee, Stephen Cavell and Edward Mooney. In the last twenty years, I have published
papers in the fields of Ethics, Social Justice, Aesthetics, Environmental
Philosophy, Jewish Studies, Holocaust Studies, Extinction Studies, Teaching
Pedagogy and the Philosophy of Literature.
Some of the titles: “The Uncanny Goodness of Being Edible to
Bears”; “Naming Adam Naming Coyote”; “Blood Intimacies:
Biodicy and Keeping Faith with Ticks”;
“The Virtue of Temporal Discernment: Rethinking the Extent and Coherence
of the Good in a Time of Mass Species Extinction”; "Impossible
Mourning: Two Attempts to Remember Annihilation"; “Persecution and
Expiation: A Talmudic Amplification of the Enigma of Responsibility in Levinas”; and ” “Speaking with Discretion: Religious
and Philosophical Perplexities in Levinas.”
During
my graduate study, I attended the University of Tübingen
as a Fulbright Scholar, where I was introduced to the poetry of Paul Celan. My book, Suffering Witness: the Quandary of
Responsibility after the Irreparable (SUNY Press, 2000), offers a Levinasian account of Celan's
poetry and the responsibility to witness the Shoah that it elicits. Because of
my interest in fostering post-Shoah Jewish thought and culture, I have been
active in the establishment of the Society for Continental Philosophy in a
Jewish Context and served among its first executive officers. I also currently serve on the executive
board for the North American Levinas Society and was
an executive officer for six years for the International Association for
Environmental Philosophy. I am a
founding member of the Levinas Research Seminar and
on the executive board of the journal, Environmental
Humanities. I have served on
the book selection committee for the Society for Phenomenology and Existential
Philosophy.
In
the last decade I have increasingly questioned what role philosophy might
assume in a post-Shoah existence. In this wise I have co-edited two books of
essays: Interrogating Ethics:
Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty (Duquesne University Press, 2005); and
Facing Nature: Levinasian Ethics and Environmental
Philosophy (Duquesne University Press, 2012).
In
2009, I was invited by Deborah Bird Rose to give the keynote address for a
conference on “Writing at the End of the World” held by the Center
for Research for Social Inclusion at Macquarie University in Australia (http://www.ecologicalhumanities.org/hatley.html). This has led to my membership in Kangaloon (a group of Australasian scholars in the
eco-humanities pursuing a poetics of political activism) and the Extinction
Studies Working Group (http://extinctionstudies.org/).
The latter group is currently working on a set of papers addressing various
exemplars of extinction and the questions they raise for thinkers in the
eco-humanities. My contribution, an
essay written in journal form and titled “Walking with Extinction,”
focuses on the Honshu wolf and was formulated in 2011 while I trekked the
Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Route in Japan as part of my
course, co-developed with Dr. Kumi Kato of Wakayama
University, on Buddhist and Shinto forms of spiritual practice in an
environmental context (JAPANESE
WINTERMESTER). In May of 2010, I co-directed a
conference at Salisbury University focusing on the eco-humanities in a time of
extinction: GeoAesthetics in
the Anthropocene. You can also
check out my current blog in regard to the subject of geoaesthetics
at: http://geoaesthetics.blogspot.com/
In
the last three years, the legacy of usurpation of indigenous lands and cultures
in Montana, where I was born and raised, has also emerged as an important
question for me. In collaboration with Nimachia
Hernandez (beginning with a conference held at Columbia University in April of
2010 and titled “Native Americans, Jews and The Western World
Order”), I have written a series of papers—as much story as philosophical
argument—addressing how scholars respectively committed to the Blackfoot
and Abrahamic traditions might question and hear one another’s
questioning in regard to the themes of memory, knowing and healing raised in
the historical landscape of genocide and ecocide, attempted or otherwise, that
is Montana. My most recent collaboration with Dr. Hernandez occurred in early
November of 2012 at a gathering on the theme of Memory and Counter Memory at
the Center for Cultural Studies and Critical Inquiry/Arizona State University: Program for Memory
and Countermemory In Spring of 2016 Dr. Hernandez and I are
putting together a special edition of the journal Environmental Philosophy on the theme of “Place,
Intelligibility and Indigeneity.”
As
a teacher, I take pleasure in exposing students to a wide range of questions
emerging in the eco-humanities and arts, with an emphasis upon critical
analysis, philosophical reflection, and poetic amplification. For the last seven years I have worked
with a class each spring semester to plant a 500 sq. ft. garden as part of our study
of ethical and social responsibility for and to the living world. I am also an active member
of the faculty involved in Religious Studies at Salisbury University. In this wise, I co-developed a course
with Dr. Bob McBrien on “Taoism, Tai-Chi and
Mindfulness.” I also
regularly offer independent study opportunities for students on scriptural
hermeneutics in Jewish, Christian, Taoist and Buddhist traditions.