Join us for Piers Stephens' farewell lecture as part of the Spring 2026 Kleiner Lecture Series. This event will take place on Thursday, April 16th, from 4:30-6:00 PM. A catered reception in the Peabody Hall atrium will follow. All are invited to attend and celebrate Dr. Stephens' work in the UGA Philosophy Department.

For Zoom access to this lecture, use this link.

Abstract: What if someone gave you a multi-piece jigsaw puzzle, but it lacked the illustration that was supposed to show you the completed picture you were meant to (re)construct? Without such an overview, you would likely find that you would have limited ability or incentive to explore the interrelationships between the pieces even if they were individually attractive, and all the hints in those pieces would not add up to telling you a meaning that could be detected without great speculative effort. In this farewell lecture to my UGA friends and colleagues after a philosophical career that has not yet involved publishing a monograph book, I shall try to explain how the jigsaw of my own work adds up to a bigger picture and incorporates linkages that are not obviously perceivable from the individual fragments. I want to sketch the illustration that connects the diverse themes around nature, liberty, pragmatism and the history of ideas that feature across my writings and how they are all meant to fit together. In doing so, I refer both backward to philosophical roots and forward to my planned post-retirement writings, as well as offering gratitude and (hopefully) some philosophical humor.

Piers H.G. Stephens (PhD University of Manchester) is an environmental philosopher with a background in the history of ideas in moral and political philosophy as well as in literature. He serves as the editor of Ethics and the Environment as well as philosophy reviews editor of the international interdisciplinary academic journal Environmental Values, and is a member of the International Society for Environmental Ethics, the American Philosophical Association, the Society for Advancement of American Philosophy, and the William James Society. His primary research interests center upon the environmental turn in political and moral philosophy but extend into the philosophical mainstream, particularly in relation to the history of ideas with special concern for ideas of freedom, nature and the good in the liberal and pragmatist traditions.