J. Baird Callicott - Biography

Biography

Callicott was born in Memphis, Tennessee on May 9, 1941, to distinguished regional artist and art instructor Burton H. Callicott (1907–2003), of the Memphis Academy of Arts (now Memphis College of Arts). In 1959, Callicott graduated from Memphis's then racially segregated Messick High School and attended Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College), earning a B. A. in philosophy with Honors in 1963. He received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for graduate study at Syracuse University, completing his M. A. in philosophy (1966) and his doctorate in the same field (1972) after earning a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship. His dissertation, titled Plato’s Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Theory of Forms, drew from the concentration of his undergraduate and graduate work: ancient Greek philosophy.

Callicott began his career as an academic philosopher in 1966 at Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis). There, as faculty advisor to the Black Students Association, he was active in the Southern Civil Rights Movement during the time of Martin Luther King Jr.’s last campaigns in the area. In 1969, Callicott joined the philosophy department of Wisconsin State University-Stevens Point (now the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point). As “an expatriate Southerner, fresh from the pitched battles of the Civil Rights struggle in Memphis, Tennessee,” Callicott believed that “the environment was under wholesale assault from every direction with no surcease in sight” and that “Civil Rights was a cause already won in the republic of ideas and in the courts (if not on Main Street in Memphis).” He “was a concerned citizen, but was also, more particularly, a challenged philosopher.” So Callicott asked “how, as a philosopher, could contribute to a rethinking of human nature and a reconstruction of human values to help bring them into line with the relatively new ideas about the nature of the environment emerging from ecology and the new physics.”

For 26 years, Callicott lived and taught in the northern reaches of Wisconsin's sand counties, located on the Wisconsin River, just ninety miles from Aldo Leopold's storied shack and John Muir's first homestead on Fountain Lake, the region that stirred the souls of two very influential environmental thinkers. Callicott writes that “the landscape that had helped shape and inspire the nascent evolutionary-ecological thought of the youthful Muir and that of the mature Leopold was the perfect setting for (me) to inaugurate (my) life-long vocation as a founder of academic environmental philosophy.” In 1995, he joined the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies at the University of North Texas in Denton. The first graduate program in environmental philosophy had been launched at UNT in 1990 under the aegis of Eugene C. Hargrove, then department chair and founding editor of the journal Environmental Ethics. The addition of Callicott’s expertise helped cement its standing as the world's leading program in the field.