Within the pluralism of the late twentieth century, when Christians continue to search for their true identity, the New Testament appropriation of the Abraham stories points to the importance of foundational traditions and the need to reinterpret them in contemporary terms.

The continuity between Paul's situation and our own which provides the basis for a viable hermeneutic is the reality of God—the God whose righteousness is proclaimed in the Roman epistle.

Aldo Leopold was a pragmatist in the vernacular sense of the word. Bryan G. Norton claims that Leopold was also heavily influenced by American Pragmatism, a formal school of philosophy. As evidence, Norton offers Leopold's misquotation of a definition of right (as truth) by political economist, A.T. Hadley, who was an admirer of the philosophy of William James. A search of Leopold's digitised literary remains reveals no other evidence that Leopold was directly influenced by any actual American Pragmatist or (...) by Pragmatism (although he may have been indirectly influenced by Pragmatism early in his career). A 1923 reference, by Leopold, to Hadley and Hadley's putative definition of truth, cited by Norton, is dripping with irony. Leopold, as he matured philosophically, regarded a profound cultural shift from anthropocentric dominionism and consumerism to an evolutionary-ecological worldview and an associated non-anthropocentric 'land ethic' to be necessary for successful and sustainable conservation. Hadley espoused a brutal form of Social Darwinism and his philosophy, as expressed in the book of Hadley's that Norton cites, is politically reactionary, militaristic and unconcerned with conservation. Leopold's mature philosophy and Hadley's – far from consonant, as Norton claims – are diametrically opposed. (shrink)

As a conservation policy advocate and practitioner, Leopold was a pragmatist (in the vernacular sense of the word). He was not, however, a member of the school of philosophy known as American Pragmatism, nor was his environmental philosophy informed by any members of that school. Leopold's environmental philosophy was radically non-anthropocentric; he was an intellectual revolutionary and aspired to transform social values and institutions.

This book stands as a testimony to the creative impact of W J Kilgore's teaching on the minds of his students. The contributors were each once students of Dr. Kilgore, and this collection of essays is designed to contribute to scholarly work in philosophy, at the same time serving as a tribute to Dr Kilgore's intellectual depth, philosophical rigor, and steadfastness of character.

The volume documents, and makes an original contribution to, an astonishing period in twentieth-century philosophy—the progress of Arne Naess's ecophilosophy from its inception to the present. It includes Naess's most crucial polemics with leading thinkers, drawn from sources as diverse as scholarly articles, correspondence, TV interviews and unpublished exchanges. The book testifies to the skeptical and self-correcting aspects of Naess's vision, which has deepened and broadened to include third world and feminist perspectives. Philosophical Dialogues is an essential addition to the (...) literature on environmental philosophy. (shrink)

What does it mean to be visually literate? Does it mean different things in the arts and the sciences? In the West, in Asia, or in developing nations? If we all need to become "visually literate," what does that mean in practical terms? The essays gathered here examine a host of issues surrounding "the visual," exploring national and regional ideas of visuality and charting out new territories of visual literacy that lie far beyond art history, such as law and chemistry. (...) With an afterword by Christopher Crouch, this groundbreaking collection brings together the work of major art and visual studies scholars and critics to explore what impact the new concept of "visual literacy" will have on the traditional field of art history. Contributors: Matthias Bruhn, Vera Dünkel, Jonathan Crary, Christopher Crouch, Peter Dallow, James Elkins, Henrik Enquist, W.J.T. Mitchell, Richard K. Sherwin, Susan Shifrin, Jon Simons, Barbara Maria Stafford, William Washabaugh. (shrink)

Each of the five volumes in the Stone Art Theory Institutes series—and the seminars on which they are based—brings together a range of scholars who are not always directly familiar with one another’s work. The outcome of each of these convergences is an extensive and “unpredictable conversation” on knotty and provocative issues about art. This fourth volume in the series, _Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic_, focuses on questions revolving around the concepts of the aesthetic, the anti-aesthetic, and the political. (...) The book is about the fact that now, almost thirty years after Hal Foster defined the anti-aesthetic, there is still no viable alternative to the dichotomy between aesthetics and anti- or non-aesthetic art. The impasse is made more difficult by the proliferation of identity politics, and it is made less negotiable by the hegemony of anti-aesthetics in academic discourse on art. The central question of this book is whether artists and academicians are free of this choice in practice, in pedagogy, and in theory. The contributors are Stéphanie Benzaquen, J. M. Bern­stein, Karen Busk-Jepsen, Luis Camnitzer, Diarmuid Costello, Joana Cunha Leal, Angela Dimitrakaki, Alexander Dumbadze, T. Brandon Evans, Geng Youzhuang, Boris Groys, Beáta Hock, Gordon Hughes, Michael Kelly, Grant Kester, Meredith Kooi, Cary Levine, Sunil Manghani, William Mazzarella, Justin McKeown, Andrew McNamara, Eve Meltzer, Nadja Millner-Larsen, Maria Filomena Molder, Carrie Noland, Gary Peters, Aaron Richmond, Lauren Ross, Toni Ross, Eva Schürmann, Gregory Sholette, Noah Simblist, Jon Simons, Robert Storr, Martin Sundberg, Timotheus Vermeulen, and Rebecca Zorach. (shrink)

This anthology of readings in the survey of Western philosophy--from the Ancient Greeks to the 20th Century--is designed to be accessible to today's readers. Striking a balance between major and minor figures, it features the best available translations of texts--complete works or complete selections of works-- which are both central to each philosopher's thought and are widely accepted as part of the canon. The selections are readable and accessible, while still being faithful to the original. Includes Introductions to each historical (...) period and to each philosopher, and an abundance of drawings, diagrams, photographs, and a timeline. This Combined Volume contains the most important works from Baird's Philosophic Classics, Volumes I-V. ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHY. Plato. Aristotle. HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY. Epicurus. Epictetus. Plotinus. MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY. Augustine. Boethius. Anselm (and Guanilo). Moses Maimonides. Thomas Aquinas. William of Ockham. Pico Della Mirandola. MODERN PHILOSOPHY. Ren Descartes. Thomas Hobbes. Blaise Pascal. Baruch Spinoza. John Locke. Gottfried Leibniz. George Berkeley. David Hume. Immanuel Kant. NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY. G.W.F. Hegel. John Stuart Mill. Soren Kierkegaard. Karl Marx. Friedrich Nietzsche. TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY. Edmund Husserl. Bertrand Russell. Martin Heidegger. Ludwig Wittgenstein. A.J. Ayer. Jean-Paul Sartre. Willard Van Orman Quine. Jacques Derrida. For anyone interested in Philosophy, History of Philosophy, or History of Intellectual Thought. (shrink)

A book of readings in Western intellectual history focusing on the role of reason in human action. Contents:^ Plato: Myth of the Cave; Plato: ^IThe Four Virtues; Aristotle: Knowledge of Causes; Aristotle: The Types of Governments; Epicurus: Epicureanism; Epictetus: Stoicism; St. Augustine: The Platonist; St. Augustine: The Nature of Sources of Evil; St. Thomas Aquinas: The Four Laws; St. Thomas Aquinas: The Nature of the Soul; Pico: The Oration on the Dignity of Man; John Calvin: Reason, Sin and Illumination; St. (...) Teresa of Avila: Interior Castle; Rene Descartes: Pens,s ; Thomas Hobbes: The State of Nature; John Locke: The State of Nature; Alexander Pope: Essay on Man; David Hume: Impressions and Ideas; Voltaire: Candide; Immanuel Kant: Space and Time; Immanuel Kant: The Good Will; Edmund Burke: Revolution in France; James Madison: The Federal Government; Soren Kierkegaard: Subjective Truth; Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Grand Inquisitor; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Communist Manifesto; Friedrich Nietzsche: The Will to Power; William James: Pragmatism; William James: Philosophical Temperaments; Sigmund Freud: The Ego and the Id; Ludwig Wittgenstein: Later Theory; Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism; Carol Gilligan: Women's Place in Man's World; Appendix: Programmed Text on Epistemology. (shrink)

The American environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott argues that we human beings are ethically obliged to promote and protect the environment as an intrinsic value. To do so, we should adopt a scientifically and philosophically informed postmodern land ethic which protects and nurtures the great chain of being (pyramids of energy) from soil to civilization. The practice of this Leopoldian land ethic requires that we transform our modernist utilitarian and Cartesian ethics which instrumentalize and alienate nature. Two key works (...) by Callicott outline his position as a mainstream academic deep ecologist: Earth’s Insights (1994) and Beyond the Land Ethic (1999). The French cultural and political philosopher, Luc Ferry, argues that deep ecological ideologies, such as Callicott’s, threatenthe historical enterprise of modernist humanism. The appeal of deep ecologists lies in their romantic and anti-Cartesian ideologies. In his book, The New Ecological Order (1995; Le nouvel ordre écologique, 1992), Ferry criticizes the deep ecologists (and he includes Callicott in this group) for their unjustified attacks on the traditions of humanism. In the conclusion to his book, deep ecological radicalism is equated with an anti-cosmopolitan “barbarism”. Ferry feels that the ideals of the European enlightenment and its modernist anthropocentrism which privileges human autonomy, freedom, and democratic ideals, have been undermined by the forces of the political left. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future of Environmental PhilosophyJ. Baird Callicott (bio)The old guy in The Graduate had just one word for Dustin Hoffman's character, Ben: "plastics." This old guy has three words for the future pursuit of environmental philosophers, young and old: global climate change (GCC).GCC is emerging as the central environmental concern of the 21st century. Back in the 20th century, E. O. Wilson's mantra was (I paraphrase) 'abrupt mass (...) anthropogenic species extinction is the crime for which posterity is least likely to forgive us.' In view of the multifaceted catastrophe graphically depicted in the recent acclaimed film, An Inconvenient Truth (AIT), Wilson's dictum seems quaint. Rather, a world whose very geography will be anthropogenically altered by risen sea levels, whose weather will be increasingly violent and erratic, whose seas will be stagnant and acidified by carbonic acid, etc., etc., is the crime for which posterity is least likely to forgive us—if there is any posterity to make a judgment.According to Al Gore in AIT anthropogenic GCC is a "moral" and "ethical" issue. But he doesn't elaborate. And at the end of the film he provides a lame list of things you and you and you and you—all of us individually AND voluntarily—can do to mitigate GCC, such as swap out halogen light bulbs for compact florescent ones and drive a hybrid car. Think "tragedy of the commons" for the efficacy of that approach to an adequate ethical response to the challenge of GCC.Gore's naivete apart, environmental ethics (EE) as we know it is singularly ill-prepared for dealing with GCC. The problem is one of scale, temporal as well as spatial. Spatially, EE concern was focused on the scale of biotic communities, ecosystems, and landscapes. And the relevant science was ecology. Temporally, the scale was also ecological: It might take Prince William Sound half a century, perhaps even a whole century, to fully recover from the Exxon Valdez spill. In temperate climates, after a clearcut a mature forest might spring up in a century and, through ecological succession, if left alone it will return to old growth in 300 years. Back in the 20th century that seemed like a long time, and we lamented that the ecological temporal scale and the economic temporal scale of [End Page 119] industries like the timber business and the oil business were out of phase, the former measured in decades the latter in quarters. But now, elderly environmental philosophers like me will personally witness little more than the initial environmental consequences of GCC—the occasional Katrina, the occasional hottest year on record, the disappearance of glaciers in Glacier National Park. We won't live to see (I hope) the cessation of the Gulf Stream or sea-levels rise more than a few centimeters. And the rectification of these consequences will be completed, if they ever are, only after thousands of years have elapsed.How then do we scale EE up to meet the moral challenge of GCC? Spatially we have a huge leap to make from the landscape scale to the biospheric scale. We have to become conversant with a new set of sciences; the relevant sciences are not ecology and conservation biology, but biogeochemistry and earth-systems science.Is a GCC EE even possible? Maybe ethics has temporal-scale limits? We used to marvel at the long view of the Iroquois who considered the consequences of present policies out seven generations. Wow! At 25 years per generation that is all of 250 years (adding on the 75-year life-span of the 7th generation). Can we have ethical concern for the 37th generation, a thousand years out? Or the 121st generation 3000 years out?J. Baird Callicott J. Baird Callicott is Regents Professor of Philosophy and Religion Studies in the Institute of Applied Sciences at the University of North Texas. From 1997–2000 he served the International Society for Environmental Ethics as president. He is author, editor, or co-editor of a score of books and more than a hundred journal articles and book chapters. Callicott's research proceeds on six major fronts: theoretical environmental ethics, land ethics, the philosophy of... (shrink)

J. Baird Callicott claims that moral pluralism leads to relativism, skepticism, and the undermining of moral obligations. Buddhist ethics provides a counterexample to Callicott; it is a robust tradition of moral pluralism. Focusing on one of the most significant texts in Buddhist ethics, Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, I show how it draws on a multiplicity of moral principles determined by context and skillful means (upāya kauśalya). In contrast to Callicott’s description of pluralism as detrimental to moral life, I suggest that South (...) Asian Buddhist traditions provide a model of moral reasoning that is both robust and flexible, a model appropriate for the many kinds of moral obligations that arise in the context of environmental ethics. (shrink)

Aldo Leopold’s draft essay “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest” from 1923 shows that his initially expressed moral concerns were primary to his view of conservation. In addition, this early essay also challenged dominant perceptions of environmental degradation in the southwestern United States in the 1920s. For these reasons, it provides a framework for examining conservation as a moral issue in South and West Africa, especially in the nations of South Africa and Ghana, building on J. Baird Callicott’s (...) summaries of Yoruba and San environmental ethics in Earth’s Insights . In the context of poverty, traditional community taboos may have already supplied the social norms of conservation that Leopold desired, but they are marginalized by modernization. As in Leopold’s essay, mainstream perceptions of environmental degradation viewed through the lens of political ecology suggest that international market forces may be more ecologically disruptive than traditional peasant agriculture. Land ethics similar to Leopold’s are implicit within the political philosophies of two of the regions’ most respected recent leaders, Nelson Mandela , who promoted land reform, and Kwame Nkrumah , who promoted pan-Africanism over neocolonialism. Community-based solutions to conservation issues illustrate the successes, failures, and the challenging complexity of modernization in these subregions. (shrink)

The reputations of scientists among their contemporaries depend not only on accomplishment, but also on interactions affected by influence and personality. The historical lore of most fields of scientific endeavor preserve these reputations, often through the identification of founders, innovators, and prolific workers whose contributions are considered fundamental to progress in the field. Historians frequently rely on the historical lore of scientists to guide their studies of the development of ideas, exhibiting justifiable caution in reassessing reputations in the light of (...) current knowledge. However, the transmission of historical lore can obscure the relative importance of accomplishment, influence and personality in shaping contemporary reputations, leaving the historian to either accept reputations at face value or attempt to reconstruct the context in which they were created. The science of taxonomy, because of its rules of priority, leaves a relatively accurate record of historical accomplishment through the persistence of taxa in catalogues and faunal guides. These records allow the modern historian an unbiased means to assess the relative accomplishments of historical figures and therefore a means to critically reassess reputations independent of personality and influence. In the historical lore of North American ichthyology, Louis Agassiz at Harvard and Spencer Baird at the Smithsonian emerge as central figures in the early development of the field during the mid-1800s, contributing not only through the quality and quantity of their science, but also through their roles as institutional leaders and mentors to workers who followed. Charles Girard, originally a student of Agassiz's and later a coworker with Baird, receives little notice in the history of ichthyology, and his reputation is that of a minor player in the initial description of the North American fish fauna, and one whose work appears to have been flawed or even careless when compared to his contemporaries. However, a review of both contemporary and modern taxonomic works reveals that Girard's productivity far exceeded that of either Agassiz or Baird. Furthermore, an examination of the tendency of Girard and his contemporaries to introduce synonymous names into the literature, which might reflect careless or uncritical work, suggests that Girard was among the more accomplished workers of his era, including Agassiz and Baird. Girard's low ranking in the folklore of North American ichthyology, therefore, can not be attributed to discernible shortcomings in his scientific work, but rather to a public and private campaign of criticism waged by Agassiz after Girard's departure from Harvard. While Agassiz's dispute with Girard stemmed from their personal interactions, he expressed them as criticisms of Girard's work, and thus helped shape Girard's scientific reputation as it has been transmitted through the lore of ichthyology. This case study reveals how scientific reputation may not always rest on accomplishment, but can be influenced by personal interactions obscured by time but nonetheless important to history. (shrink)

William Baird collection in Social Sciences is the gift of the Estate of William Cameron Baird.

The writings of William H. Whyte do not loom large in the literature of my field: environmental ethics, the branch of ethics devoted to consideration of whether and how there are moral reasons for protecting non-human animals and the larger natural environment. Environmental ethics is a very new field of inquiry, only found in academic philosophy departments since the early 1970s. While there is no accepted reading list of indispensable literature in environmental ethics, certainly any attempt to create such (...) a list would begin with Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and a more recent handful of senior scholars who had been writing on these topics early on, such as J. Baird Callicott, Val Plumwood, Peter Singer, Richard Sylvan, Tom Regan, and Holmes Rolston III (for a review of contemporary environmental ethics, see Light 2002, Palmer 2003, and Wenz 2001). (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to reveal philosophical ideas in the mythology and folklore of the indigenous peoples of North America. An important question: "Can we assume that the spiritual culture of the American Indians contained philosophical knowledge?" remains relevant today. For example, European philosophy is defined by appeals to philosophers of the past, their texts. The philosophical tradition is characterized by rational argumentation and formulation of philosophical questions that differ from the questions of ordinary language. However, the problem (...) lies in the term "philosophy", which belongs to the so-called "philosophical untranslatability" and has many definitions. The question of whether philosophy is exclusively a phenomenon of European culture is still controversial. In the article, the concept of philosophy is used in a broad sense, which allows the analysis of the intellectual heritage of the culture of the indigenous people of North America for philosophical ideas. Theoretical basis of the study consists of primary sources, which are limited due to the "documentary horizon". It contains myths about the Twins, ritual rhetoric, examples of dream interpretation practices and the practical wisdom of tribal chiefs. The Chronicle of "Vallamolum", or "the Red List", testifies to the special idea of the Indians about history and their own historicity. Analysis of cosmogonical and cosmological ideas reveals the special features of the anthropological ideas of the North American Indians. Combined with the philosophical ideas of the Puritan philosophy of the settlers of New England, this analysis allows us to explore in more detail the processes of acculturation. The study uses critical literature from scholars and leading researchers of the wisdom and philosophy of Native Americans, such as Michael Yellow Bird, J. Baird Callicott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dennis H. McPherson, Lewis Henri Morgan, Thomas M. Norton-Smith, J. Douglas Rabb, Paul Radin, Jon Ewbank Manchip White. The views of early American philosophers: R. Williams, W. Penn, R. W. Emerson, on the problem of the relationship between the culture of settlers and the indigenous people of North America are noteworthy. Originality lies in the application of historical and philosophical methodology, identifying the features of philosophizing in the spiritual culture and worldview of the indigenous people of North America. Conclusions. In the conclusions, the obtained results complement the history of the origin and development of philosophical thought of the early American philosophy. (shrink)

In the past two decades, reinforcement learning has become a popular framework for understanding brain function. A key component of RL models, prediction error, has been associated with neural signals throughout the brain, including subcortical nuclei, primary sensory cortices, and prefrontal cortex. Depending on the location in which activity is observed, the functional interpretation of prediction error may change: Prediction errors may reflect a discrepancy in the anticipated and actual value of reward, a signal indicating the salience or novelty of (...) a stimulus, and many other interpretations. Anterior cingulate cortex has long been recognized as a region involved in processing behavioral error, and recent computational models of the region have expanded this interpretation to include a more general role for the region in predicting likely events, broadly construed, and signaling deviations between expected and observed events. Ongoing modeling work investigating the interaction between ACC and additional regions involved in cognitive control suggests an even broader role for cingulate in computing a hierarchically structured surprise signal critical for learning models of the environment. The result is a predictive coding model of the frontal lobes, suggesting that predictive coding may be a unifying computational principle across the neocortex. (shrink)

Most philosophical accounts of emergence are incompatible with reduction. Most scientists regard a system property as emergent relative to properties of the system's parts if it depends upon their mode of organization--a view consistent with reduction. Emergence can be analyzed as a failure of aggregativity--a state in which "the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts." Aggregativity requires four conditions, giving tools for analyzing modes of organization. Differently met for different decompositions of the system, and in different (...) degrees, these conditions provide powerful evaluation criteria for choosing decompositions, and heuristics for detecting biases of vulgar reductionisms. This analysis of emergence is compatible with reduction. (shrink)

Bringing together ecology, evolutionary moral psychology, and environmental ethics, J. Baird Callicott counters the narrative of blame and despair that prevails in contemporary discussions of climate ethics and offers a fresh, more optimistic approach.

Most philosophical accounts of emergence are incompatible with reduction. Most scientists regard a system property as emergent relative to properties of its parts if it depends upon their mode of organization-a view consistent with reduction. Emergence is a failure of aggregativity, in which ``the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts''. Aggregativity requires four conditions, giving powerful tools for analyzing modes of organization. Differently met for different decompositions of the system, and in different degrees, the structural conditions (...) can provide evaluation criteria for choosing decompositions, ``natural kinds'', and detecting functional localization fallacies, approximations, and various biases of vulgar reductionisms. This analysis of emergence and use of these conditions as heuristics is consistent with a broader reductionistic methodology. (shrink)

This article reports the findings of a survey examining if there are gender and career stage differences between male and female practitioners regarding ethical judgment. The results show that, on average, females adopted a more strict ethical stance than their male counterparts on 7 out of 19 vignettes. Males on the other hand, demonstrated a more ethical stance than their female counterparts on 2 out of 19 vignettes. The results furthermore indicate there is a significant difference in ethical judgment across (...) career stages. Overall, it appears that practitioners in later career stages display higher ethical judgment than practitoners in lower career stages. Implications are provided for both practitioners and academicians. (shrink)

What is the true significance of biological kinship? During the last decades, it seemed to be uncontroversial that abandoned and even adopted people feel the negative impact of biological parents’ absence throughout life in several ways (Miller et al. 2000; Keyes, Margaret A., Anu Sharma, Irene J Elkins, and William G. Iacono, Matt McGue. 2008. The Mental Health of US Adolescents Adopted in Infancy. Archive Pediatric Adolescense Medicine 162(5): 419–425.). However, in the case of people conceived via “third-party reproduction”, (...) especially in sperm donation, the disruption of the kinship network derived from natural bonds tends to be presented as something irrelevant. This article disputes that assumption, explores its relationship with a deconstructivist vision that presents kinship as a purely social construct and defends the personal and existential value of a person’s biological bonds with her parents. While analysing the anthropological shift inherent to the way some political discourses present the nuclear family and heterologous biotechnology, it proposes renewed philosophical attention on the significance of filiation and human affinity. This article argues for the density of genealogical ties and defends that the consecration of an individual “right to a child”, namely (but not exclusively) through the normalised access to sperm banks, is incompatible with the rights of the child, since it deprives people from knowing not only who but also how is their father. (shrink)

This paper presents the Obstetric and Neonatal Ontology (OntONeo). This ontology has been created to provide a consensus representation of salient electronic health record (EHR) data and to serve interoperability of the associated data and information systems. More generally, it will serve interoperability of clinical and translational data, for example deriving from genomics disciplines and from clinical trials. Interoperability of EHR data is important to ensuring continuity of care during the prenatal and postnatal periods for both mother and child. As (...) a strategy to advance such interoperability we use an approach based on ontological realism and on the ontology development principles of the Open Biomedical Ontologies Foundry, including reuse of reference ontologies wherever possible. We describe the structure and coverage domain of OntONeo and the process of creating and maintaining the ontology. (shrink)

Over the course of the last four decades, William Leon McBride has distinguished himself as one of the most esteemed and accomplished philosophers of his generation. This volume—which celebrates the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday—includes contributions from colleagues, friends, and formers students and pays tribute to McBride’s considerable achievements as a teacher, mentor, and scholar.

: Recently a number of influential academic environmentalists have spoken out against wilderness, most prominently William Cronon and J. Baird Callicott. This is odd, given that these writers seem to support two cornerstone positions of environmentalism as it has developed over the past twenty years: first, the view articulated within environmental ethics that wild, nonhuman nature, or at least some parts of it, has intrinsic or inherent value; second, the understanding developed within conservation biology that we have entered (...) a period of massive anthropogenic biodiversity loss and that landscape-level habitat preservation is essential for combating this. I argue here that Cronon and Callicott are wrong. In fact, an ethics of respect for nonhuman nature and an informed, scientific understanding of what is necessary to preserve it do strongly support increased wilderness preservation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Exploring Visual Culture: Definitions, Concept, ContextsPaul DuncumExploring Visual Culture: Definitions, Concept, Contexts, edited by Matthew Rampley. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005, 257 pp., $32.00 paper.I review this new introductory text in light of its competition as a textbook for undergraduates and as an introduction for graduate students. Other such texts include Barnard, Elkins, Mirzeoff, Walker and Chaplin, and Sturken and Cartwright,1 which appears to be the most widely (...) used. Rampley's anthology stands up well among these competitors, especially for those who wish to transition from art to contemporary popular visual culture rather more gently than other texts that, for many students, might come as too abrupt a disjuncture from mainstream practice in schools of art and design. As Matthew Rampley states in his excellent introduction, if the book has an original contribution to make, it is to situate an acknowledgment of traditional practices and issues into the makeup of visual culture studies. Unlike other texts, mentioned above, which tend to stress screen and print media, Rampley's agenda is to remind readers of the historical origins of many recent developments as well as the contribution of cultural forms other than two-dimensional ones. Thus, chapters are included that trace the history and continuing contribution of traditional media; art, design, craft, and architecture each receive individual chapters. MacDonald, for example, describes the complex meanings of craft and its relationship to fine art and design from classical times to today, as well as summarizes the characteristics and politics of craft today. Furthermore, the influence of technology is charted principally through conventional art, and the chapters on photography, film, and fashion are likewise cast largely in terms of historical accounts of whether these forms should be considered to be art.The historical bias is equally evident in the pictures used to illustrate the text. While, for example, there are contemporary popular images, such [End Page 118] as a cover of the Sun newspaper and a photograph of Punks, there are as many crossover images—postcards of famous art portraits and a Michelangelo on a T shirt—as well as many conventional artworks. Delacroix, Corbert, Rauschenberg, David, Fuseli, and Van Goyen are each featured. Some of the popular images are also historical, such as George Mêlées 1902 classic film Voyage to Moon and advertisements from the1930s.Sometimes the historical material takes up much of the space, with recent developments given only cursory treatment, and sometimes the material is dealt with in ways that seem rather old-fashioned to this reader. For example, Glyn Davis's chapter on photography and film is primarily a potted historical account of the relationships between these two cultural forms and art. Further, Davis does not just describe the arguments for and against their inclusion as art but is clearly engaged with these issues himself, an engagement that many proponents of visual culture would find rather quaint—that is, rather less interesting than the particular contribution that these forms make to contemporary life and for whom the question, "Is it art?" is no longer of any particular interest. This art orientation also colors Davis's view of Hollywood films. Clearly preferring "art" films, he completely ignores the role of popular film in exploring the fears, anxieties, beliefs, and so on of the wider public. By contrast, Richard Williams argues against architecture as a form of art, with its limited concerns with aesthetics, style, and canonical buildings, in favor of architecture as discourse and spatial experience. He is more interested in the reception of architecture than its production—first with architecture as signs, as meanings that are mutable, contingent, and arbitrary; and, secondly, as ordinary urban lived experience, with how architecture is but one element within the experience of urban environments.Typical of the avoidance of technical terms in the book as a whole, Williams beautifully describes the difference between structuralism and poststructuralism without once mentioning either of these terms, and in a chapter on architecture he manages to use the term "postmodern" only once. Similarly, in Neil Mulholland's chapter on representation and realism, cultural border crossing and indigenization are both described, albeit briefly, though without recourse to these terms... (shrink)

The theory-theory claims that the explanation and prediction of behavior works via the application of a theory, while the simulation theory claims that explanation works by putting ourselves in others' places and noting what we would do. On either account, in order to develop a prediction or explanation of another person's behavior, one first needs to have a characterization of that person's current or recent actions. Simulation requires that I have some grasp of the other person's behavior to project myself (...) upon; whereas theorizing requires a subject matter to theorize about. The frame problem shows that multiple, true characterizations are possible for any behavior or situation. However, only one or a few of these characterizations are relevant to explaining or predicting behavior. Since different characterizations of a behavior lead to different predictions or explanations, much of the work of interpersonal interpretation is done in the process of finding this characterization - that is, prior to either theorizing or simulating. Moreover, finding this characterization involves extensive knowledge of the physical, cultural, and social worlds of the persons involved. (shrink)