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Richard Rorty listsMartin Heidegger among the three greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Dewey. Even those who would propose a very different list would agree that Heidegger has been among the most influential philosophers of the past century. His thought underlies later developments in Continental philosophy, from existentialism to postmodernism, and has influenced analytic philosophers such as Wilfrid Sellars, Rorty, and Robert Brandom. It has had an even more sweeping impact on developments in other parts of the humanities, which have abandoned traditional humanistic pursuits in favor of “theory” and embraced a kind of anti-intellectualism dressed in a garb of elaborate verbiage ultimately inspired by and derived from Heidegger. Finally, it has shaped our political discourse and culture, altering our conceptions of ideologies throughout the political spectrum. I will focus here on some concepts central to Being and Time (1927), Heidegger’s greatest and most influential work. They constitute important Acad. Quest. DOI 10.1007/s12129-014-9417-4

Themost important concept in current environmental thinking is sustainability. Environmental policies, economic policies, development, resource use—all of these things, according to the consensus, ought to be sustainable. But what is sustainability? What is its ethical foundation? There is little consensus about how these questions ought to be answered. Many environmentalists are troubled by the plethora of understandings of sustainability in the literature. Andrew Dobson, for example, counts more than three hundred definitions! Others see this as a virtue, equating sustainability with other contested concepts such as happiness, justice, and rights. Either way, exploring the ethical significance of sustainability is a vital task. Surprisingly, almost nothing has been done to justify sustainability as an ethical constraint. My aim is to investigate whether that can be done. I shall argue that the chief conceptions of sustainability in the environmental literature are not themselves sustainable. They often have innocuous interpretations that are plausible but do little to advance the environmentalists’ or any other particular agenda. Their more radical interpretations, however, lack ethical foundations; they face obvious counterexamples when applied to individual lives and communities. There is no reason to take any of them as criteria that any environmental, economic, developmental, or resource management policy must meet, or even as goals toward which any such policy ought to strive. Acad. Quest. (2010) 23:84–101 DOI 10.1007/s12129-009-9152-4

Over the centuries, philosophy has been seen in many ways: as a midwife to the birth of ideas, as queen of the sciences, as an owl flying at dusk, as a ladder to be kicked away upon reaching enlightenment, and as a large-scale map relating the small-scale maps of the sciences. The image suggested by philosophy's role in recent changes in the academy is Typhoid Mary-one who infects others while avoiding serious illness herself. Many ideas that underlie the politicization of the university had their origin in philosophy. Yet philosophy has largely managed to escape politicization.