Graham Parkes

After being trained in analytic philosophy at Oxford and UC Berkeley, Graham Parkes switched to Continental European thought while teaching aesthetics at UC Santa Cruz. Having developed an interest in Indian, Tibetan, and Chinese philosophies while in California, he found a position at the University of Hawai‘i, where he was encouraged to contribute to the programme in Asian and comparative philosophy and to develop competence in Japanese thought. This last was enhanced by later appointments as a visiting scholar at Harvard: at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and then as a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions.

His engagement with East-Asian thinking prompted an expansion of the project of orienting philosophy toward Asia by including two further directions. Firstly, an orientation to practical applications, and especially toward environmental problems and climate change. Secondly, an orientation toward other media for the dissemination of philosophical ideas in addition to the spoken and written word: namely, film and video. These interests led to adjunct appointments in the Division of Ecology and Health and the Academy of Cinematic and Digital Arts at the University of Hawai‘i.

In 2008, Parkes moved back to Europe to take up a professorship at University College Cork in Ireland. The following year he was obliged to be the Head of the new School of Philosophy and Sociology, and in 2011 he chose to become the founding director of the Irish Institute for Japanese Studies. During his tenure as the Roche Chair a year later, he began work on a manuscript that eventually became How to Think about the Climate Crisis: A Philosophical Guide to Saner Ways of Living (2021).

He left Ireland in 2015 to take up visiting positions in Singapore and then Shanghai, and is now a professorial research fellow at the University of Vienna.