Professor Robin Attfield - MA (Oxon), PhD (Wales)
Overview
Position:
Professor of Philosophy
Email:
AttfieldR@cf.ac.uk Telephone: +44(0)29 208 76224
Fax: +44(0)29 208 74618
Extension: 76224
Location: Humanities Extension, Colum Drive, Cathays, Cardiff, CF10 3EU.
Research Group
Postgraduate Students
He welcomes applications from prospective research students with interests in environmental philosophy and ethics.
Research Interests
Environmental philosophy (most branches); Ethics (including history of ethics); History of ideas (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries); Philosophy of religion (religious language and theistic arguments).
Selected Publications
Creation, Evolution and Meaning, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. ISBN 0-7546-0474-8 and 0-7546-0475-6. pp. ix + 234.
Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century, Polity Press, Cambridge, and Blackwell, Malden, MA, 2003. ISBN: 0-7456-2737-4 (hb); 0-7456-2738-2 (pb). pp. xii + 232.
The Ethics of the Global Environment, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999, in the World Ethics Series edited by Nigel Dower, ISBN: 07486-0895-8; also West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999, ISBN: 1-55753-189-7. pp. viii + 232.
Value, Obligation and Meta-Ethics, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995, in the Value Inquiry Books Series edited by Robert Ginsberg; ISBN 90-5183-857-3 (hb), 90-5183-862-X (pb). xv + 319.
God and The Secular: A Philosophical Assessment of Secular Reasoning from Bacon to Kant (2nd edn.), Aldershot: Gregg Revivals and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1993, ISBN 0-7512-0243-6. pp. 231.
The Ethics of Environmental Concern (2nd edn.), Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1991, ISBN 0-8203-1349-1 (hb), 0-8203-1344-0 (pb). pp. xxiii + 249.
Publications
Supererogation and Double Standards, Mind, LXXXVIII, 1979, 481-99
With Barry Wilkins (joint editor), International Justice and the Third World: Essays in the Philosophy of Development, London and New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. ix + 207, ISBN 0-415-06924-6 (hb); 0-415-06925-4 (pb)
Environmental Philosophy: Principles and Prospects, Aldershot: Avebury and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1994, pp.viii + 262; ISBN 1-85628-566-9
With Andrew Belsey (joint editor), Philosophy and the Natural Environment (also published as Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 36), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. vi + 250, ISBN 0-521-46903-1
With Katharine Dell (joint editor), Values, Conflict and the Environment (Report of the environmental ethics interdisciplinary Working Party of the Ian Ramsey Centre, St. Cross College, Oxford), 2nd edn., Aldershot: Avebury, and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1996, pp. xii + 174; ISBN 1-85972-491-4
‘Rousseau, Clarke, Butler and Deism’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 12.3, 2004, 429-443; ISSN 0960-8788
With Johan Hattingh and Manamela Matshabaphala, ‘Sustainable Development, Sustainable Livelihoods and Land Reform in South Africa: A Conceptual and Ethical Inquiry’, in Third World Quarterly, 25.2, 2004, 405-21; ISSN 0143-6597
‘Unprojected Value, Unfathomed Caves and Unspent Nature’, Environmental Values, 14.4, 2005, 513-18; ISSN, 0963-2719
‘The Shape of a Global Ethic’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 32.1, 2006, 5-19; ISSN: 0191-4537
‘Environmental Ethics and Global Sustainability’, in Henk A.M.J. ten Have (ed.), Environmental Ethics and International Policy, Paris: UNESCO, 2006, 69-87, ISBN-10: 92-3-104039-1; ISBN-13: 978-92-3-104039-9
Research
Robin Attfield's teaching and research concerns ethics, philosophy of religion, history of ideas and environmental philosophy. His most recently published book is Creation, Evolution and Meaning, an interdisciplinary work bestriding the philosophies of religion, science and meaning and environmental ethics, published by Ashgate in 2006. His previous book was Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century (Polity/Blackwell, 2003). His edited collection The Ethics of the Environment is due to be published by Ashgate in 2008.
Biography
Robin Attfield studied philosophy, classics and ancient history at Christ Church, Oxford and Theology at Regent's Park College, Oxford, undertook research at Manchester University, and has been lecturing in Philosophy at Cardiff since January 1968. He has also taught in Nigeria (1972-3) and in Kenya (1975). His Wales PhD was completed in 1972, and he has been a Professor of Philosophy from 1992.
He is a member of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and was until recently a co-opted member of the Executive Committee of the British Philosophical Association. He is chair of the Cardiff Branch of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and has participated recently in a UNESCO international working party on Environmental Ethics.