Commentators on Uwe Reinhardt's Tanner Lecture. The Tanner Lectures are a collection of educational and scientific discussions relating to human values. Conducted by leaders in their fields, the lectures are presented at prestigious educational facilities around the world.

Hegel’s discussion of sense certainty in the Phenomenology of Spirit contains the following, humorous, observation.

The Philosophy of Nature does not begin, as we expect, with nature. Instead, Hegel describes the practical and theoretical approaches we make to nature as philosophers; that is, in thought and, metaphorically, with our teeth. This ledge on the climb into nature is often overlooked as we rush from the logic into space and time. There may be two reasons for this. The first is a natural expectation that a philosophy of nature begin by describing natural phenomena, not our approaches (...) to them. The second is that the terms ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’, familiar from the Logic and Philosophy of Spirit, may seem at first glance to be out of place here. Whatever the reason, these paragraphs have not been discussed at any length in the secondary literature. (shrink)

Puritans had big stories to tell, and they cast themselves big parts to play in those stories. The fervent English Protestants who believed that the Elizabethan Church urgently needed further reformation, and the self-selecting band among them who went on to colonize New England, were sure that they could re-create the churches of the apostolic age, and eliminate centuries’ worth of Romish accretions. By instituting scriptural forms of worship, these purified churches might have a beneficial influence on the state as (...) well, and bring about the rule of the godly. If a purified English church and state could inaugurate reformation across all of Christendom, spread the gospel to infidels around the globe, and usher in the millennium, then all the better. In 1641, an anonymous tract called A Glimpse of Sions Glory announced that the new puritan-controlled Parliament would bring on “Babylon's destruction... The work of the day [is] to give God no rest till he sets up Jerusalem in the praise of the whole world.” The leading minister of colonial Boston at the time, John Cotton, predicted that as soon as 1655, as Michael Winship summarizes Cotton: the states and Christian princes of Europe, under irresistible supernatural influence, would have instituted congregationalism [Massachusetts’ form of church polity] and overthrown Antichrist and Muslim Turkey. The example of their churches’ pure Christianity would have brought about the conversion of Jews and pagans across the globe. Thereafter, the churches of Christ would enjoy the millennium's thousand years of peace before the climactic battle with Gog and Magog at the end of time. Those are big stories. (shrink)

Various 'nonmarket' economic valuation methods have been used to compute 'total' value of nonmarketed natural resources and related recreation. We first outline the history of these valuation techniques and use the Exxon Valdez disaster response and the valuation of whooping cranes, an endangered species, as examples of how these tools can constrain policy. We then explain how, by excluding non-economic social spheres, economic valuation techniques produce a terministic screen that deforms policy makers' vision of the ecological problems faced by society. (...) Using Luhmann's functionalist social theory, we demonstrate that when natural resource managers privilege economic motives, they trivialize other social functions such as education, politics, religion and law. This process presents a significant ethical dilemma for democracies by first naturalizing, then ethicizing, existing pattersns of domination. (shrink)

The application of hierarchy theory to ecological systems presents those who seek a radical change in human perspectives toward nature with a unique window of opportunity. Because hierarchy theory has enabled scientific ecologists to discover that the window through which one chooses to observe a system influences its reality, they may now be more amenable to including the perspectives of deep and feminist ecologists into their self-definition. A synergy between deep, feminist, and scientific ecology could improve environmental policy by encouraging (...) more ecofeminists to encompass the marginalisation of nonhuman life-forms within the ethic of care, more deep ecologists to encompass the issues of overconsumption and militarisation within the anthropocentric-biocentric polarity, and more scientific ecologists to scrutinise the politics behind their investigations. (shrink)

In the early years of the 20th century, physicists bumped into the quantum level of observation. They began to experience problems with their observations which, disturbingly, seemed to suggest as much about the underlying psychological foundation of the scientist as about the universe—or worse, which suggested that these two might somehow be internally related. Heisenberg and Gödel, among others, raised questions that science was hard pressed to answer. Quantum wave theory and relativity involved the observer in the observation, but paradoxes (...) seemed to result from attempts to describe how they are related. (shrink)