ABSTRACT

John Passmore was born in 1914, in Manley, New South Wales. Passmore wrote widely in many fields of philosophy, but it was with his magisterial history of the subject since the mid-nineteenth century, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, that he first attracted a wide readership. Relatedly, Passmore is dismissive of those who regard man as a 'planetary disease' or 'obscene defiler' of 'flower-sweet Earth', purveyors of 'masochistic nonsense' who are blind both to the achievements of civilization and to the legitimate interests of human beings. Passmore's most hostile critics, unsurprisingly, came from the ranks of those writers whom he has accused of purveying the 'rubbish' discussed above. Deep ecologists, eco-feminists and others convicted Passmore of a complacent and speciesist 'human chauvinism'. Passmore's other response to his radical critics was simply and unapologetically to accept their labelling him a 'chauvinist', 'speciesist' and 'shallow'.