Professor Evans's teaching and research interests include environmental philosophy, existential philosophy and romanticism, and the aesthetics of landscape. A current project focuses on Paul Strand's abstract photographs.
News on Claude Evans' retirement - https://philosophy.wustl.edu/news/claude-evans-retires
Explores how humans can take the lives of animals and plants while maintaining a proper respect both for ecosystems and for those who live in them.
We eat, inevitably, at the expense of other living creatures. How can we take the lives of plants and animals while maintaining a proper respect for both ecosystems and the individuals who live in them—including ourselves? In this book philosopher J. Claude Evans challenges much of the accepted wisdom in environmental ethics and argues that human participation in the natural cycles of life and death can have positive moral value.
With a guide for the nonphilosophical reader, and set against the background of careful and penetrating critiques of Albert Schweitzer's principle of reverence for life and Paul Taylor's philosophy of respect for nature, Evans uses hunting and catch-and-release fishing as test cases in calling for a robust sense of membership in the natural world. The result is an approachable, existential philosophy that emphasizes the positive value of human involvement in natural processes in which life and death, giving and receiving, self and other are intertwined.
Derrida and Phenomenology is a collection of essays by various authors, entirely devoted to Jacques Derrida's writing on Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. It gives a wide range of reactions to those writings, both critical and supportive, and contains many in-depth studies.
In the past two decades, the "movement" of deconstruction has bad tremendous impact on a number of academic, disciplines in the United States. However, its force has been rather limited in the field of philosophy, despite the fact that in Europe the practice of deconstruction emerged in the work of philosophers. Although the reasons for this can be debated, two of the more obvious explanations are the mainstream Anglo-American philosophers rarely studied the German and French philosophical traditions in great detail, and deconstruction's focus on discourse and interpretation has made it more attractive to the literary and humanistic disciplines.
With this context, Strategies of Deconstruction focuses on the early work of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher who introduced deconstruction in Speech and Phenomena, his study of Edmund Husserl, and Of Grammatology, and whose philosophical reputation stems in no small part from his work on Husserl. In examining the philosophical import of Derrida's theories of reading, text, and language, specifically as they related to Speech and Phenomena, J. Claude Evans makes careful reference to Husserl's own texts. His analysis indicates that there are many systematic irregularities in Derrida's study and that without those irregularities Derrida's conclusions cannot be substantiated.
The general topic of this book is the metaphysics of the subject in Kantian transcendental philosophy. A critical appreciation of Kant's achievements requires that we be able to view Kant's positions as transformations of pre-Kantian philosophy, and that we understand the ways in which contemporary philosophy changes the letter of Kantian thought in order to be true to its spirit in a new philosophical horizon. Descartes is important in two respects. One the one hand, he institutes a philosophical movement which can be said to culminate in Kant; on the other hand, Descartes is one of the major opponents against whom Kant argues in establishing his own position. In either case, the Cartesian cogito is a central concern. Wilfred Sellars restates and transforms Kantian positions in the context of contemporary philosophy after the "linguistic turn", using the Platonic metaphor that thought is similar to discourse.
