PROFILE

Eric Katz is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy in the Department of Humanities at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.  He received a B.A. in Philosophy from Yale in 1974 and a Ph.D.in Philosophy from Boston Universityin 1983.  His research focuses on environmental ethics, philosophy of technology, engineering ethics, Holocaust studies, and the synergistic connections among these fields.  He is especially known for his criticism of the policy of ecological restoration. 

 

Katz has published over 80 articles and essays in these fields, as well as two books: Anne Frank’s Tree: Nature’s Confrontation with Technology, Domination, and the Holocaust (White Horse Press, 2015) and Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and Natural Community (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), winner of the CHOICE book award for “Outstanding Academic Books for 1997.” He is the editor of Death by Design: Science, Technology, and Engineering in Nazi Germany (Pearson/Longman, 2006).  He has co-edited (with Andrew Light) the collection Environmental Pragmatism  (London: Routledge, 1996) and (with Andrew Light and David Rothenberg) the collection Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). He was the Book Review Editor of the journal Environmental Ethics from 1996-2014, and he was the founding Vice-President of the International Society for Environmental Ethics in 1990.  From 1991-2007 he was the Director of the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) program at NJIT.

 

Current research projects involve science, technology, and environmental policy in Nazi Germany.

 

RECENT WORK

E. Katz.  Anne Frank’s Tree: Nature’s Confrontation with Technology, Domination, and the Holocaust. Cambridge, UK: White Horse Press, 2015.

 

E. Katz. “Anthropocentrism and the Anthropocene: Restoration and Geoengineering as Negative Paradigms of Epistemological Domination,” in Climate Change Ethics and the Non-Human World, Brian G. Henning and Zack Walsh, eds. London and New York: Routledge, 2020, pp. 23-32.

 

E. Katz. “Replacement and Responsibility: The Problem of Ecological Restoration as Moral Repair,” Ethics and the Environment 23 (2018): 17-28.

 

E. Katz.  “Geoengineering, Restoration, and the Construction of Nature: Oobleck and the Meaning of Solar Radiation Management,” Environmental Ethics 37 (2015): 485-498.

 

E. Katz, “Anthropocentric Indirect Arguments: Return of the Plastic-tree Zombies,” Ethics, Policy, and Environment 17 (2014): 264-266.

 

E. Katz, “The Nazi Comparison in the Debate over Restoration: Nativism and Domination,” Environmental Values 23 (2014): 377-398.

 

E. Katz, “Further Adventures in the Case against Ecological Restoration,” Environmental Ethics 34 (2012): 67-97.

 

E. Katz, “The Nazi Engineers: Reflections on Technological Ethics in Hell,” Science and Engineering Ethics 17:3 (2011): 571-582.

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