I was born in 1943, in Houston Texas and grew up mostly in Kalamazoo Michigan. I have lived, among other places, in Chicago; NYC (1963-64); E. Lansing; Detroit; Minneapolis; Pittsburg KS; and Bowling Green KY (the latter since 1984). I am a widower.

My areas of professional specialization are classical Greek philosophy and ethics. My primary teaching responsibility, apart from Introductory courses in philosophy, is for our department's survey course in the history of ancient and medieval philosophy and our course in business ethics. Currently I am in the process of translating a book from the French whose English title would be ARISTOTLE AND THE THEOLOGY OF THE LIVING IMMORTALS. It is about Aristotle's ideas concerning the gods and the connection of those ideas with other aspects of his philosophy.

Some thoughts on pantheism are contained in a public talk which I gave in May 1997 entitled "The Case for Pantheism." Slightly modified and with a somewhat new title, the talk can be found on my website at:
http://www.wku.edu/~garreje/panthesm.htm

Other introductory level philosophy talks, essays, and dialogues composed by me may be found at:
http://www.wku.edu/~garreje/poptindx.htm
You will find links there to pieces on Stoic philosophy, Aristotelian ethics, the ancient gods as understood by Homer and by Plato, and pantheism.

I first learned about Paul Harrison's Scientific Pantheism website from an article in Time magazine, which I happened to pick up in a doctor's office. Like so many of us in this group, I was very impressed when I checked it out. After some e-mail exchanges with Paul, I joined the mailgroup and have been active ever since.

Some of my contributions have stirred up a fair amount of controversy, for example, my pantheist interpretation of the Book of Job and, more recently, a critique, based on some articles in the Nation magazine, of NASA's Cassini launch (which carried over 70 lbs of plutonium).

I am one of those who thinks that the "second plank" of Paul's scientific pantheism, "the earth is sacred," is at least as important as the first, "the universe is divine." The second plank reminds us of our environmental obligations, and, as I interpret it, means that we are obliged to make rather drastic economic and lifestyle changes, and do whatever we can both personally and politically, in keeping with democratic process, to promote those changes. It makes little sense to recycle our paper and beercans if we are not working against the arms race, or if we endorse the attempt to export Northern consumption patterns to "developing" nations and welcome the destruction of tropical rainforests so that poor countries can pay their international debts.

I do not believe that scientific curiosity can justify risking the wellbeing of Earth's inhabitants, so I do not share the view of some enthusiasts for science that new technologies are mostly exciting and benign. The fact is that the major technological breakthroughs of the past century are the primary causes of our ecological problems today. We will have grown up as a species only when we stop looking at more energy-intensive technologies as a cure-all for the human condition.

At the same time, I support scientific method as the primary method for gaining knowledge of the natural world, including the precise nature of the ecological problems we are creating and which we need to learn to avoid or reverse. While science cannot be wholly separated from technology, the fact that scientific breakthroughs make new technologies possible is no conclusive argument that just any possible technology ought to be created and widely used.

Since joining the Pantheist discussion group I have been searching the history of recent philosophy for a philosopher who takes scientific method seriously and rejects, as pantheists do, the dualism of the Western monotheist tradition, a philosopher of process who is to our time roughly what Heraclitus might have been to his. I found such a philosopher in the American pragmatist John Dewey, a thinker whom I did not take very seriously before my association with this mailgroup. Several of my contributions to the mailgroup since the beginning of the summer have been attempts to apply some of Dewey's ideas to the problems we have been discussing. Dewey was not a pantheist but he was perhaps the greatest of the nondualist thinkers of the twentieth century and a profound defender of democracy and scientific method. We have a lot to learn from him.
October 24, 1997

Jan Garrett, Bowling Green KY USA
jgarrett@wku.campus.mci.net or
Jan.Garrett@wku.edu