Phila Back

Phila Back is an issue and electoral campaign organizer and independent philosopher.  Issues that she has worked on include land use and preservation, water, air, energy, mining, endangered species, public lands, climate, education, fair trade, healthcare, campaign finance reform and voting rights.  She has participated in an anti-poverty commission, revitalization plan committee and community garden project in Reading, Pennsylvania.

In 2015 and 2016 Back published a series of articles on neoliberalism in The Lehigh Valley Vanguard.

This work is the product of decades of training, experience and thought about how to get large numbers of people engaged in the democratic process.  She was a candidate for delegate to the 2020 Democratic National Convention pledged to Bernie Sanders.

Back has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Reed College.

garden

Plenitude

My garden is a plenum – a spatially continuous living community which includes me, its caretaker – and I intuitively experience it as such while simultaneously perceiving a visual panorama, an audible space filled with the music of cicadas, crickets and birds as well as an expanse of floral perfume.

September 8, 2023

tai chi

Building Strength

Our prize, the goal of our actions and our lives is to achieve the ecological civilization in which, as far as possible, humans interact with each other and nonhuman natural things for maximum mutual benefit.

June 29, 2023

shift key

Shifting the Paradigm

With his 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn launched the concept of paradigm shift which could be applied to a variety of historical cultural changes as well as desired future ones. 

May 8, 2023

Onward! From Minimal to Maximal Self

Fully living is not only what we by nature desire, it is also what we are fundamentally driven to do – at once maximizing our selves and the rest of life, while it in turn does the same for us.  Failing to do this mimimizes our selves and all else, so live!

April 5, 2023

conversation

A 2022 Under the Radar Movement

I discovered a new under the radar movement of otherwise inactive people talking to each other.  These were citizens freely acting on their own initiative to link up with others as citizens with the aim of  making real the promise of democracy.

November 30, 2022

brown-eyed susans

Silent Stalwart

Like the profuse blooms of the brown-eyed susan, a multitude of people must come forth to fully pursue, serve and save life.

August 3, 2022

Load More