Eric Buck

ebuck (at) transformativestudies.org

I have worked on farms, in construction, in a food cooperative, as a academic counselor, a youth minister, a philosophy professor, and for a volunteer non-profit. I have lived for long periods in Maine (my family home), western New York, Washington, DC, Lexington, KY, and Billings, MT. I have four formal college degrees, culminating in a PhD in philosophy. My last employment was as philosophy professor at a regional state university in Montana. I have been dreaming about starting a college of a different stripe for years, and was lucky enough to have attended one in Goddard College, where I wrote a Masters thesis on anarchism and cooperation. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of architecture. All that came after a degree in theology and church history. I am a spiritual and philosophical floozy, and would like to work with learners of similar inclinations.

I have a deep feeling for thinking, and enjoy that process alone and with others. I relish a good concept, well expressed, thoroughly worked out, especially the concept of wholeness and related notions.

I have taught and can teach western and eastern philosophies, with special interest in practice theory, social philosophy, Daoism, Zen, phenomenology and existentialism, and holomereology (the study of wholeness or of wholes and parts); the literatures of Le Guin, Berry, Hesse, Kazantzakis, Mahfouz, Dillard, and others; architecture and urbanism; aesthetics; anarchic ethics; anarchism, both vernacular and formal, both its history and philosophies. I am working on a few projects at the time: an autocommentary on the Daodejing combined with a play based on the Zhuangzi; a project on the architecture, economics and sociality of cohousing and community land trusts; a few larger works on architecture and urban form, anarchic ethics, and a philosophy of anarchy.

I enjoy working wood with hand tools, and carpentry in general. My students have designed a meditation hut, a labyrinth, a park bench and table for a campus, a classical dry stone garden, and an anarchic city using a process that I call Sociatecture. My spiritual practice is a mindfulness one, namely meditation in the style of zazen. I have served on architectural studio juries in Kentucky and lectured frequently on issues in urban design. In Maryland, with the food coop, I was design-process lead for the expansion of the store. I guess you could say I see philosophy as a creative practice or a life, and it links up very nicely with traditional creative disciplines.

I would like to learn Chinese and Spanish; improve my French; collaborate on a guitar ensemble (I am a long-time but plateaued amateur); learn west African dance. I hope people with these skills want to teach in the college.

I see the teacher's role as making a wide array of tools available — including concepts, histories, reflective procedures, and theories — for the use of students in their own educational processes. Students will most enjoy working with me who love reading and philosophical reflection, and who think and live their way toward their next stage of self-cultivation and toward the anarchic transformation of society by being contributing members of new social processes. Well, that's perhaps too specific. I would enjoy working with any student engaged in the process of self-creation. I would gladly assist in independent studies in philosophy, architecture and urbanism, the intersections of myth, psychology and sociology, anarchy, radical pedagogy, and more besides.

Financial Structures

Fees

50 hours of course meeting time - $500
40-49 hours - $11/hour
20-39 hours - $12/hour
10-19 hours - $13/hour
1-9 hours - $14/hour
Drop in on any class - $15

Independent study fees - $ xx/hour of meeting (lesson, discussion) time, $ xx/book read

Cost Mitigation (no double discounts)

5-10 students enrolled - 10% discount/student for cash up front
11-15 students enrolled - 10% discount/per student
16-20 students enrolled - 15% discount/per student

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