About the Professor

Kenneth Sayre   Professor of Philosophy University of Notre Dame

Photo courtesy of University of Notre Dame

Prof. Kenneth Sayre received a PhD at Harvard in philosophy and spent two years working at M.I.T. before coming to ND in 1958.  Apart from visiting appointments at Oxford, Cambridge, and Princeton, he's been here ever since.  He has taught and published in various areas, including theory of knowledge, philosophy of artificial intelligence, and Plato.  Since the mid-1970’s, however, he has been increasingly occupied with environmental issues.

Prof. Sayre's environmental interests were first focused on the production and distribution of electric power.  In 1977 a research group under his direction published Values in the Electric Power Industry, followed by Regulation, Values, and the Public Interest in 1980.  In 1979 he co-edited Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century, dealing with issues in environmental ethics.  From 1981 through 1991 he was on the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal Environmental Ethics, in which he published articles on energy and the environment.

In 2002, Sayre taught a course entitled “Ethics, Ecology, Economics, and Energy”  to a dozen dedicated and talented students.  A subsequent run of the course in 2004 was taught to a larger group of about 30 students.  In the meantime, Sayre developed a manuscript with the intentionally provocative title “Earth Not Ours” – suggesting that the earth is not property to be bought and sold.  As a result of this teaching experience, he returned to the manuscript for a more complete revision.  The resulting work was given a new title, no less provocative than the first but perhaps more informative.  It is now called “Unearthed: The economic Roots of our Environmental Crisis.”