" With this succinct formulation, Murray Bookchin launches his most ambitious work, The Ecology of Freedom.

This work represents Murray Bookchin's riposte to the antihumanism, mysticism and antirationalism which are influencing many people's attitudes to environmental problems. Bookchin offers a critique of, among others, social Darwinists, deep ecologists, new agers, technophobes, Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard.

Robyn Eckersley claims erroneously that I believe humanity is currently equipped to take over the “helm” of natural evolution. In addition, she provides a misleading treatment of my discussion of the relationship of first nature and second nature. I argue that her positivistic methodology is inappropriate in dealing with my processual approach and that her Manichaean contrast between biocentrism and anthropocentrism virtually excludes any human intervention in the natural world. With regard to Warwick Fox’s treatment of my writings, I argue (...) that he deals with my views on society’s relationship to nature in a simplistic, narrowly deterministic, and ahistorical manner. I fault both of my deep ecology critics for little or no knowledge of my writings. I conclude with an outline of a dialectical naturalism that treats nature as an evolutionary process-not simply as a scenic view-and places human and sodal evolution in a graded relationship with natural evolution. I emphasize that society and humanity can no longer be separated from natural evolution and that the kind of society we achieve will either foster the development of first nature or damage the planet beyond repair. (shrink)

The failure of socialism, particularly its Marxian variety, to provide a revolutionary alternative has been followed by a highly abstract form of socialist theory that stands sharply at odds with a practical revolutionary project. Its retreat from the factory to the academy—an astonishing phenomenon that cannot be justified by viewing “knowledge” as a technical force in society—has denied socialism the right to a decent burial by perpetuating it as a professional ideology. To the extent that the academy itself has become (...) increasingly disengaged from society, it has used socialist theory to indulge its worst habits. The remains of a once-insurgent movement have provided the intellectual nutrients for conceptual frameworks utterly alien to it—a level of discourse, a range of perceptions, a terminology, and a body of pretensions that mutually reinforce the reduction of ideology to socialism and of socialism to ideology. (shrink)

All the old crap of the thirties is coming back again--the shit about the "class line," the "role of the working class," the "trained cadres," the "vanguard party," and the "proletarian dictatorship." It's all back again, and in a more vulgarized form than ever. The Progressive Labor Party is not the only example, it is merely the worst. One smells the same shit in various offshoots of SDS, and in the Marxist and Socialist clubs on campuses, not to speak of (...) the Trotskyist groups, the International Socialist Clubs and the Youth Against War and Fascism. (shrink)

This collection of essays by one of the world's most respected ecologists calls for a critical social standpoint that transcends both 'biocentrism' and ...

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)

Recent debates about the most appropriate political agents for realising social justice have largely focused on the potential value of national political parties on the one hand, and trade unions on the other. Drawing on the thought of Murray Bookchin, this article suggests that democratic municipalist agents – democratic associations of local residents that build and empower neighbourhood assemblies and improve the municipal provision of basic goods and services – can often also make valuable contributions to projects of (...) just social change. I identify a long-term and a more short-term argument for the value of democratic municipalist agency in Bookchin's thought and claim that the latter provides a compelling case for the valuable contributions this form of action can make to the achievement of a wide variety of visions of social justice. This provides a useful partial corrective to recent political theorising about the nature of the partisanship and trade unionism necessary to secure social justice. (shrink)

IT CAN BE ARGUED that there is no objective measurement of the influence of an individual’s thought upon collective social movements, especially in the case of direct democratic social movements for human emancipation from authority. This is certainly the case with Murray Bookchin, a revolutionary thinker who renounced Marxism to re-imagine anarchism and renounced anarchism to form his own political proposition of communalism and democratic confederalism. While it is impossible to measure the influence of Bookchin’s thought and (...) action on the current social-historical global timescape, it is also impossible to ignore it, visible as it is in the revolutionary democratic institution of Kurdish Rojava, and within contemporary ecological and social movements. When I embarked on an inquiry into the importance of Bookchin for Greek social movements, I understood that it was a task never to be completed. Τhe libertarian, anarchist editor Michalis Protopsaltis used to say, “It’s not the naked truth coming out of the well, it is just my opinion.”. (shrink)

Bookchin's social ecology explores the narrative of domination and hierarchy. He argues that today's environmental crisis reflects a link between the human domination of nature and the domination of human by human. Hierarchy, as the pivot of such domination, is viewed as a psychology which permeates and corrodes not only social life (as reflected in class, gender, ethnic and other relations), but nature as well. Bookchin, seeking to replace hierarchy with cooperation by devolving power and autonomy to the (...) individual in community, produces an eco?anarchism. Bookchin argues for the interpenetration of the human and the natural, seeing humans as ?nature rendered self?conscious?. Since evolution is viewed as a dialectic privileging participation, differentiation and spontaneity, community becomes both the means and ends of an ecological society. The critique in this paper explores the autonomy?community tension in Bookchin as well as the broad political implications of Bookchin's framework of social change. (shrink)

I provide an exposition and critique of the ecological ethics of Murray Bookchin. First, I show how Bookchin draws on ecology and evolutionary biology to produce a mutually constraining cluster of ethical guidelines to underpin and justify his vision of a nonhierarchical, ecological society. I then critically examine Bookchin’s method of justification and the normative consequences that flow from his position. I argue that Bookchin’s enticing promise that his ecological ethics offers the widest realm of (...) freedom to all life forms is undermined by the way in which he distinguishes and privileges second nature over first nature. I conclude that Bookchin’s promise can only be delivered by a biocentric philosophy rather than by his own ecological ethics. (shrink)

이 글은 북친이 사회생태론에서 제시하고 있는 자유 자연의 실현 가능성을 살펴보는 것이다. 자유 자연은 인간과 자연이 조화롭게 살아가는 이상적 생태사회를 지칭하며 이의 실천 지침이 코뮌주의다. 북친은 자연에 대한 자신만의 독특한 관점으로 생태문제와 사회문제를 하나의 틀 안에서 바라본다. 동식물이나 풍경을 일차 자연이라 정의하고 인간이 창조한 문화를 포함한 자연을 이차 자연이라고 정의한다. 북친은 생태 문제를 인간에 의한 인간 지배 문화가 인간의 자연 지배로 이어진 결과로 보는데, 일차 자연과 이차 자연 사이의갈등이 극복된 자유 자연이라는 이상적인 생태사회 도래를 전망하고 있다. 그런데 북친의자유 자연이 실현되기 (...) 위해서는 변증법적 자연주의라는 사회생태론의 논리체계가 타당해야 하고 실천 지침으로 제시하고 있는 코뮌주의가 현실 사회에서 실천 가능해야 한다. 북친의 자유 자연은 헤겔과 마르크스주의의 변증법적 논리구도를 응용하여 미래 이상사회 도래를 예언한 기계론적 사회발전관이다. 마르크스주의 정치실험 사례에서 알 수 있듯이 애초에 이상사회 도래를 예언하는 기계론적인 사회발전 법칙은 사물의 지속적인 변화의 속성을 전제로 하는 변증법적 논리구도와 양립될 수 없다. 또한 국가의 해체와 현재의 전 지구적 시장 구조 극복을 전제로 하는 코뮌주의 실현의 구체적 방법이 충분히 제시되지 못하고 있다. 그러나 북친의 자유 자연 구상은 긍정적인 의미가 크다. 생태문제를 사회문제와 하나의틀 안에서 바라보고 그 해법 또한 사회 구조의 변화에서 찾았는데 이는 녹색당의 출현 등 생태정치운동의 전 지구적 확산의 이념적 기초가 되었다. 특히 아나키즘과 마르크스주의라는가장 급진적인 사상의 영향을 받았음에도 불구하고 그 실현 방법론에서 온전히 비폭력적인실천 방침만을 제시하고 있는 점이다. 이는 북친의 생태철학이 사회체제 변혁이라는 급진성에도 불구하고 오늘날까지 지속적으로 전개 될 수 있는 중요한 시사점으로 봐야 할 것이다. (shrink)

Title: Lessons of the Spanish RevolutionPublisher: Freedom PressAuthor: Vernon RichardsTitle: The Anarchist CollectivesPublisher: Black Rose BooksAuthor: Sam Dolgoff Title: The Spanish Anarchists 1868-1936Publisher: HarperCollinsISBN: 0060906073Author: Murray Bookchin.

This book provides a compositional, truth-conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. Central to the proposed theory is the distinction between what propositional content is at-issue and what content is not-at-issue. Evidentials contribute not-at-issue content, and can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. In this volume, Sarah Murray builds on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials (...) and related phenomena, and proposes a semantics that does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, she argues that all sentences make three contributions: at-issue content, not-at-issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At-issue content is presented and made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground; not-at-issue content directly updates the common ground; and the illocutionary relation uses the at-issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type, can trigger further updates. 0The analysis is supported by extensive empirical data from Cheyenne, drawn from the author's own fieldwork, as well as from English and a variety of other languages. (shrink)

This paper investigates a contemporary flowering of flânerie similar to that which Walter Benjamin analyzed in the first decades of the Parisian arcades. The flâneur has resurrected in a new space of the recent past as the computer hacker of digital culture. There is, however, a significant difference between the two figures’ ways of relating to the world that gives the hacker an important socio-political agency – with which Benjamin tried, unsuccessfully, to imbue in the flâneur.

Session 1. The blossoming of the culture of confusion and the Church : selections of a post-truth mindset -- Session 2. Confusion's consequences -- getting freedom wrong -- Session 3. Clarity about freedom -- Session 4. Clarity about human dignity -- Session 5. Clarity about sexuality, gender, and identity -- Session 6. Clarity about science and faith -- Session 7. Clarity about religious pluralism -- Session 8. The son through fog : clarity's hope -- Closing words.

Provides a comprehensive overview and introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Propositions.

It is commonly supposed that metaphysical modal claims are to be evaluated with respect to a single domain of possible worlds: a claim is metaphysically necessary just in case it is true in every possible world, and metaphysically possible just in case it is true in some possible world. We argue that the standard understanding is incorrect; rather, whether a given claim is metaphysically necessary or possible is relative to which world is indicatively actual. We motivate our view by attention (...) to discussions in Salmon 1989 and Fine 2005, in which various data are taken to support rejecting the transitivity of accessibility and modal monism ; we argue that relativized metaphysical modality can accommodate these data compatible with both standard modal logic and modal monism. Noting an analogy with two-dimensional semantics, we argue that metaphysical modality has a complex structure, reflecting what is counterfactually possible, relative to each indicatively actual world. In arguing for the need for relativization, we are broadly on the same side as Crossley and Humberstone and Davies and Humberstone ; our contribution here is, first, to offer distinctively metaphysical reasons for relativization, and second, to show that relativization can be incorporated in ways minimally departing from standard modal logic. (shrink)

This is a rough translation of Michael Frede's "La théorie aristotélicienne de l'intellect agent" published in 1996. This insightful paper contains an important interpretation of Aristotle's notoriously difficult theory of the active intellect from De Anima III, 5. I worked up a translation during some research and thought others might benefit from having an English translation available (I couldn't find one after a cursory internet search). It's not perfect, but it should give one a sense for Frede's argument that the (...) agent intellect is the same as the divine intellect of Metaphysics Lambda. I welcome any comments or suggestions for improvement, please email me at smurray7 [at] providence [dot] edu. (shrink)

The science of mind wandering has rapidly expanded over the past 20 years. During this boom, mind wandering researchers have relied on self-report methods, where participants rate whether their minds were wandering. This is not an historical quirk. Rather, we argue that self-report is indispensable for researchers who study passive phenomena like mind wandering. We consider purportedly “objective” methods that measure mind wandering with eye tracking and machine learning. These measures are validated in terms of how well they predict self-reports, (...) which means that purportedly objective measures of mind wandering retain a subjective core. Mind wandering science cannot break from the cycle of self-report. Skeptics about self-report might conclude that mind wandering science has methodological foundations of sand. We take a rather more optimistic view. We present empirical and philosophical reasons to be confident in self-reports about mind wandering. Empirically, these self-reports are remarkably consistent in their contents and behavioral and neural correlates. Philosophically, self-reports are consistent with our best theories about the function of mind wandering. We argue that this triangulation gives us reason to trust both theory and method. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Free‐Rider Problem The Sorites Paradox So, is it Rational for Me to Contribute by Not Climbing? Concluding Remarks and Implications Notes.

Avatar is a high‐styled entertainment, a nature narrative, an environmental allegory, a reflection on religion and spirituality, a global warning, a love story, and more. It illustrates two different views of individualism and communitarianism. Contracts and investments are important catalysts for the action of avatar. The avatar program also owes its existence on pandora to what comes down to a contractual arrangement with the RDA. It offers a cautionary tale to remind that a selfish individualist ethics can blind the importance (...) of other people, of communities, and of the living world of which are a part, even to the point of threatening their very survival. The avatar also reminds that the moral community need not be restricted to a single race or even to a single species. (shrink)

Fechner's conception of psychophysics included both “outer psychophysics” the relation between stimulus intensity and the response reflecting sensation strength, and “inner psychophysics” the relation between neurelectric responses and sensation strength. In his own time outer psychophysics focussed on the form of the psychophysical law, with Fechner espousing a logarithmic law, Delboeuf a variant of the logarithmic law incorporating a resting level of neural activity, and Plateau a power law. One of the issues on which the dispute was focussed concerned the (...) appearance of contrasts if the overall illumination was increased or decreased; another issue was the question of whether a sensation of a “just noticeable difference” established for one value of a sensory dimension appeared the same for a value elsewhere on the dimension. The development of “inner psychophysics” led through the works of Delboeuf, Solomons, Jastrow, and Thurstone to modern signal detection theory. A third line of research, devoted to the question of what was meant by the “measurement” of sensation strength, stemmed from the criticism of Fechner's work by von Kries (1882) and others. Although a valid body of science could be built up without the intervening variable called “sensation strength,” such a science might be a cumbersome representation of reality. When an optical contrast is set up, and its overall illumination is increased or decreased, subjective contrasts involving medium levels of lightness vary little as illumination varies (as a power law based on sensation ratios or a logarithmic law based on sensation differences predict), but subjective contrasts involving extreme levels of lightness might be subject to the effects of other variables. (shrink)

The paper addresses a plea by accounting educators that ethics should be integrated into the accounting curriculum (Poje and Zaman Groff 2022). Further, accountants should teach ethics. Case learning is consistent with Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy of six levels of learning. The ethics literature supports using cases to teach ethics because cases allow each student to put themselves in the position of a decision-maker. Case selection should engage the learner emotionally. Therefore, current issues are preferable. With these goals—engaging the student as (...) a learner, ensuring action learning, and meeting the learning taxonomy of Bloom, the paper provides educators with a suggested road map of case materials that can be employed in accounting courses across the program. Road maps are a means to demonstrate a holistic view of curriculum design and learning execution across specific accounting courses. (shrink)

The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Formgathers Patrick Murray's essays reinterpreting Marx and Marxian theory published since his Marx's Theory of Scientific Knowledge(1988), along with a previously unpublished essay and an introduction.

This edition is not an OCR or a photocopy. It is a new edition.

Introduction -- Early days -- Basics -- Social evolution -- Veblen's new theory -- The critique continued -- Veblen's theory of business -- The Great War -- Revolution.

(Re)presentations of evil in media, philosophy and literature -- The dangerous ones : when evil was a woman -- Space/times of evil : political life and social worlds.