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Professor Peterson is a Goldfarb Center Fellow for 2009-2010, and has organized an environmental philosophy conference at Colby in April of 2010 on the theme of sustainability. Speakers will include Holmes Rolston, III (Emeritus University Distinguished Professor, Colorado State University), Karen Warren (Emeritus Professor, Macalester College), Bryan G. Norton (Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy Distinguished Professor), and Joel Kovel (Formerly of Bard College and editor of the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism).

Dr. Peterson’s training is primarily in European philosophy from Kant to the present, and his primary areas of interest include ecophilosophies and philosophy of nature, value theory, and philosophical anthropology. These three areas intersect in the traditional question of the “place of human being in nature,” a problematic renewed in this era of environmental crisis. He has published a translation from German of an important text in the philosophy of nature by the German Idealist F. W. J. Schelling (SUNY Press, 2004), and is currently working on a book called All That We Are, which resituates traditional philosophical anthropology within the context of current critical and ecological philosophy (SUNY Press, under contract). He is also Co-Chair of the Society for Ecofeminism, Environmental Justice, and Social Ecology (an affiliate of the International Association of Environmental Philosophy).

SUNY Press

A translation of F.W.J. Schelling's First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799), SUNY Press, 2004.

Appearing here in English for the first time, this is Schelling's attempt to articulate a complete philosophy of nature. Written in 1799 and building upon his earlier work, the First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature provides the most inclusive exposition of Schelling's philosophy of the natural world. In it he presents a startlingly contemporary model of an expanding and contracting universe; a unified theory of electricity, gravity, magnetism, and chemical forces; and, perhaps most importantly, a conception of nature as a living and organic whole.

With Introduction and Notes by the translator, this is also the first translation to be based on the new Schelling critical edition.