The Fool: Selected Proceedings from the Third Annual North Georgia Student Philosophy Conference

Chris Aflague, David Jones (eds.)

This is the third volume in a unique series that combines the work of promising undergraduate and graduate students with essays by distinguished scholars. Essays are selected from the 3rd Annual North Georgia Student Philosophy Conference and represent its best papers. In his keynote address, From the Earth’s Veins to the Body’s Meridians: Classical Chinese Views of the Environment and Health, Graham Parkes  of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa argued that, “the importance of place in the practice of the medical arts is common in ancient treatments of the topic. But rather than seeing this concern merely as an outmoded piece of folk science, we might more fruitfully understand it as an anticipation of the recent talk in medical and epidemiological discourse of the importance of “contextualizing the person”—but in this case a contextualization that extends beyond the community and social spheres to the biosphere and atmospheres that are the context for all human  existence.” It would seem that since the onset of environmental ethics in the 1960’s, “a new paradigm” for understanding place would be  announced every few years, but, as Dr. Parkes notes, “the more of these ‘new paradigms’ I came across in the literature, the more I kept thinking that I had seen them all somewhere before—in classical Chinese thought, where the individual’s relation to place is paramount.”