Steve (stevesapontzis.com) is professor emeritus of philosophy at California State University, East Bay. He specialises in animal ethics, environmental ethics & meta-ethics. He was co-founder in 1985 of Between the Species: A Journal of Ethics & served as its initial co-editor. Steve was a member of the board of the American Philosophical Quarterly. In 1983, Steve founded, with his wife Jeanne, the Hayward Friends of Animals Humane Society. They now operate Second Chance, Helping the Pets of People in Need, in California. Steve wrote the books "Morals, Reason & Animals" & "Subjective Morals" & edited Food for Thought: The Debate over Eating Meat.
I'm afraid the audio is patchy - I should have organised a better mic for Steve - sorry! If you struggle to follow our conversation on the podcast, please find episode 97 here on the Sentientism YouTube channel where I've edited a complete transcript as subtitles. Don't forget to subscribe while you're there! I'll post that transcript on Sentientism.info too for those who would prefer just to read.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”
Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
We discuss:
00:00 Welcome
01:14 Steve's Intro
- Growing up in Salt Lake City to French/Greek parents
- Greek Orthodox & Methodist Christian
- Order of the Cross (vegetarian)
- Going vegetarian as a teenager
- Philosophy at Rice University, Texas
- Louis Mackey & Kierkegaard
- University of Paris & existentialism & Merleau Ponty
- PhD at Yale
- Cal State
- Retirement
- Hayward Friends of Animals & Second Chance charities
- Singer's Animal Liberation "The only philosophy book with a cookbook at the end"
- Teaching animal ethics, ethical theory, environmental ethics
9:19 What's Real?
- Going through the motions at church
- "I didn't really believe in god it was not something that appealed to me whatever."
- "There's so much suffering in the world."
- The limits of science in understanding reality "I think the meaning of a poem is something that's real"
- "Reality is very complicated and things are real in I think a wide variety of ways"
15:47 What (& Who) Matters?
- Writing "Subjective Morals"
- "morals are created by human beings"
- The self-centred and the other-social
- "morals develop in order to reinforce the strength of our other social motivations"
- "there's no limitation to empathy"

...and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info and on YouTube.
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Thanks Graham.