Professor Keith Peterson’s lecture, “The Past that has never been Present: The Changing Role of the a Priori in Philosophical Anthropology was very educational for me. I have never taken a philosophy class before, so the term a Priori was new to me. In the lecture, Professor Keith Peterson explained the term as ‘prior to experience”. Throughout the lecture, he gives examples of common a priori experiences. The first he gives is one found in what we call prejudice. The term prejudice is a pre-judgment, but it has no cognitive status and it is lacking in “objective validity”. But then he shifted and explained how we can use a priori to better understand environmentalism and the environmental debate.
I connected Professor Keith’s lecture to two previous lecture we had that related climate change with literature and the humanities. In this lecture, Professor Peterson referenced William Rees’s work which explored topics like genetic determinism. Peterson explained that that is when knowledge of increased risk or even imminent crisis is rarely sufficient to induce either individual behavioral change or societal transformation. This recurring idea of literature being able to fill some gaps in the conversation or provide parallels to current beliefs about environmentalism has been explored by Wai Chee Dimock and Nathan K. Hensley. Both believe that the answer to climate change awareness requires the collaboration of both the sciences and the humanities.
However, in Professor Keith Peterson’s lecture he believes that instead of answering questions about environmentalism, philosophical literature can provide insight into people’s resistance to accepting scientific evidence on climate change. Going back to this idea of the a priori, Peterson explained that many people are so apathetic to climate change ideas because this a priori cognition is very difficult to overcome. A priori is the knowledge that comes from prior experience and because many have not had first-hand experience with the negative effects of climate change, it makes it hard for them to rise up and do something about it.
During the question and answers part of the lecture, someone in the audience asked, “Who is at the table changing the mind of climate change conversations?” Professor Keith Peterson’s response was that everyone must be there and that if we want the thing to change, we have to envision a world that moves behind the status quo and challenges our current ideals. I was really intrigued by his response because as it stands now many are very ambivalent to the urgency or climate change. The following question was that, “Do we need a personal encounter with climate change to fully understand and want to work against it because we don’t include to cognitively think of climate change in the macro level? His response to this question was that Education has to do with transmitting some amount of information but that may not be the best way for us to learn things. Since we live in manufactured habitats, we need to get out and experience nature. I really liked this answer because I found myself wondering what a first-hand encounter with climate change would really look like because its effects don’t really present themselves at the micro level. But in order for real change to be made, we as a society need to push behind what is comfortable and strive to explore beyond what we currently know. By doing this we will be better positioned to make progress in addressing climate change.