Greyt Big Talk w/ Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
Ethics in the Anthropocene
Philosopher Jeremy Bendik-Keymer on our collective, ethical responsibility to care for the Earth in the Age of the Human.
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Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
Philosopher; professor, Case Western Reserve University
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer is a philosopher and professor at Case Western Reserve University, where he has held the Beamer-Schneider Professorship in Ethics and now chairs the Faculty Senate. A passionate lover of educational innovation, he taught at Yale, the University of Chicago, Colorado College and the Jesuit college Le Moyne, and helped build the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates into a global top 500 university.
Besides writing two novels, as he calls them, The Ecological Life and the mixed-genre Solar Calendar, and Other Ways of Marking Time, he co-created the MIT volume Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future, and later books include Nussbaum's Politics of Wonder. He was on the project team for We Are All Explorers, the first study of a city-wide Reggio Emilia preschool approach in low-income, diverse Chicago neighborhoods. A published poet, he wrote weekly for Emirates Today and co-hosted an environmental ideas show on Dubai Eye Radio in the mid-2000s. Around Cleveland he has collaborated on socially engaged art and social justice initiatives and created Moral Inquiries in Coventry, a community philosophy group.
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Location
Arras Keathley
1151 N. Marginal Rd., Cleveland, OH, 44114
Arras Keathley was a Cleveland advertising and marketing agency. Arras started in 1991 and joined with Keathley Advertising in 2011, and for a time the combined agency kept its offices aboard the boat at 1151 North Marginal Road on the downtown lakefront, which it shared with the software firm LeanDog. In August 2018 Arras Keathley was acquired by Adcom and its operations moved into Adcom's Warehouse District headquarters. LeanDog still lists the boat at 1151 North Marginal Road as its home.
About this event
Earth scientists increasingly agree that we are in a new geological era, the Age of the Human, which Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen called "the Anthropocene." Climate change, mass extinction, ocean acidification, plastics in soil and water, extreme weather and rising seas are all part of it.
Philosopher Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, then the Beamer-Schneider Professor in Ethics at Case Western Reserve University, asked how to live well in this era. The Anthropocene plays out over thousands of years and across the whole planet, yet each of us lives here and now with little sense of how we are involved. How should we live in this? How do we think about a good human life and a great society?
The theme was Ethics, and the morning was held on the water, aboard the boat on the downtown lakefront that housed the Arras Keathley and LeanDog offices.





