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Bill Vitek

Bill Vitek is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, director of the New Perennials Project, and editor of New Perennials Publishing. He taught philosophy for 32 years at Clarkson University with the objective of helping students understand how the philosophical imagination can and must do useful work in the world. With Wes Jackson he edited Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place, and The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge. Bill plays piano in The Jazz Collective, a group of veteran musicians playing from the Great American Songbook in Vermont, USA.

Battle of Salamis

The Pandemic Armchair Philosophy Blog 02.24.2021

By Bill Vitek, Resilience.org

The Pandemic Armchair Philosophy Blog welcomes the beginning of the end of the COVID-19 crisis, but a “return to normal” should refocus us on a long list of global climate emergencies, social injustices, and tottering democratic institutions.

  • February 24, 2021
Harvesting kernza

Transforming life on our home planet, perennially

By Wes Jackson, Aubrey Streit Krug, Bill Vitek, Robert Jensen, Resilience.org

With nearly eight billion people on the planet, we aren’t going back to hunting and gathering. But around the world, often under the banner of agroecology, people are using modern science and traditional knowledge to develop ways of farming that are less ecologically and socially destructive.

  • December 8, 2020
1755 Lisbon earthquake

Pandemic Armchair Philosophy Blog: August 25, 2020

By Bill Vitek, Resilience.org

Voltaire gives readers a glimpse of the overwhelming weight of the universe and the worst abuses imagined by human beings. And he does it in a way that we can hold them in our hands, smile at their absurdities, remain fortified against their eventualities, and work to plant and grow new ideas and systems...

  • August 25, 2020
Tavern scene

The Pandemic Armchair Philosophy Blog, 05.18.20

By Bill Vitek, Resilience.org

How do we live wise and virtuous lives with all of our human frailties laid bare by a pandemic?  Hume, I think, would answer: with others, with humor and kindness, and with constant checks on the assumptions and certainties we hold too tightly and too often in opposition to others, be they viral or human. 

  • May 18, 2020
hunkering down

Hunker is a Verb

By Bill Vitek, Yale University Press

In a genuinely tragic and terrifying moment like this one, there is little room for romantic notions of a simpler, slower life. There is nothing particularly romantic about hunkering down. The term denotes a crouching close to the ground while applying oneself to a task.

  • May 5, 2020
Declaration of Independence

Common Sense Redux

By Bill Vitek, Resilience.org

To state unequivocally, “These are revolutionary times!” is to recognize that the world is changing in ways that we would not necessarily choose; that it will change even if it goes against what we would otherwise choose; and that we can no longer choose to resist it.

  • April 22, 2020
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