This paper addresses two issues: the controversy over pragmatism in environmental philosophy, and the habitual exclusion of William James's work from serious examination. Addressing critiques of pragmatic naturalism from Max Horkheimer, Eugene Hargrove and Holmes Rolston, I argue that their criticisms misfire, primarily due to skewed perception derived from mis-interpretative projections of views to which pragmatism is not committed. I conclude that the critics' major concerns are largely groundless, but that greater emphasis on pragmatism's experiential aspect would clarify this.

William James’s radical empiricism and pragmatism constitutes a philosophy that can reconcile the split between intrinsic value theorists, who stress the development and relevance of theoretical axiology, and pragmatists who have favored a more direct emphasis on environmental policy and application. By distinguishing James’s emphasis on direct personal experience from John Dewey’s more socialized approach, James’s distinctive emphasis on the transformative possibilities of pure experience and his links to romantic sensibility enable us to articulate and validate the noninstrumental aspects of (...) experienced environmental values that anti-pragmatists habitually regard pragmatism as unable to speak for. Using James’s framework to explicate and support Anthony Weston’s radically noninstrumental “immediate values” better expresses the felt noninstrumental worth of nature than intrinsic value theory can. Nonetheless, a rapprochement between the two sides is possible: although James’s pragmatic naturalism is the framework that can best capture nature’s experienced noninstrumental worth and link it to wider human values, intrinsic value theory has real practical application in the realm of law, and pragmatists can support it in that domain, thus upholding the primary emphasis on practicality and policy that is usually seen as pragmatism’s main strength. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Pragmatist Philosophy of History by Marnie BinderPiers H. G. StephensA Pragmatist Philosophy of History Marnie Binder. Lexington Books, 2023.Looking at current scholarship and opinion in American philosophy, one can easily conclude that there has been much more work done on studying the history of pragmatist philosophy than there has been on what pragmatist philosophy can give to the study of history. Ever since the resurrection of interest (...) in pragmatism in the late twentieth century, we have seen a range of publications offering new interpretations for the ideas of the classical pragmatists, as well as important new applications for philosophical pragmatism and the moving to center stage of historically sidelined individuals and groups. What we have seen relatively little of, however, aside from a 2016 symposium in the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, is sustained engagement with the question of what a classically pragmatist approach to historical inquiry might contribute, entail, or imply. It is this important niche in the ecosystem of American philosophy that Marnie Binder's A Pragmatist Philosophy of History seeks to partially fill in.Binder, who is perhaps best known for her past writings on José Ortega y Gasset, is at pains from the start to indicate both the humility and the utility of her project. As befits the tradition, there are no grandiose philosophical pretensions here, with the "goal in presenting a pragmatist philosophy of [End Page 112] history" merely being "to add another apparatus to the toolkits of the philosopher and the historian," an extra perspective that is "meant to complement other methodologies" (xi; emphasis in original), as she explains in her introduction. At the same time, pragmatism can offer something distinctive, firstly through asking the pragmatic question of what difference is meant by the accepting of particular presumed facts as being true, and secondly, being able to better understand why certain historical details have relevance, value, and meaning for us as a result of answering the first question. A pragmatist philosophy of history is helpful then, Binder maintains, as it "is in a unique position to bridge the speculative analytic divide" (xiii), and her approach to doing this is to draw upon the resources found in the works of a succession of the familiar classical pragmatists, building toward a synthesis and a cashing out of insights in her concluding reflections.Structurally the work consists of an explanatory introduction followed by six chapters, each dedicated to a particular pragmatist and their insights, leading finally to an extended concluding section drawing the component parts together and answering possible objections to the project. Pragmatism, as Binder recognizes, is seldom thought of as a historically orientated philosophy, but she argues that for each of these thinkers—William James, John Dewey, F. C. S. Schiller, Charles Sanders Peirce, George Herbert Mead, and Jane Addams—there is at least the germ of a philosophy of history that can be unearthed and developed, eventually helping to inform understanding of what is needed to bring a pragmatist ethics into practical reality, the last of which is manifested primarily by Addams. Thus, the treatment of William James in chapter 1 homes in on James's psychological insights into the way that experienced reality forms a temporal continuum; our consciousness necessarily selects from the experiences of the past, ascribing interpretations and assuming levels of facticity and relevance, since no individual can know all the facts or select among them with perfect impartiality. The continuum will be one that speaks to the inquirer's concerns with accuracy, practicality, meaningfulness, and coherence, as all knowledge comes about through temporal processes, and since past events are continuously added to and can be continuously reinterpreted, it can have no real or ultimate beginning or end. Accordingly, for a Jamesian pragmatist account, the "continuum of history is the way in which we construct a meaning for history of the connected past experiences with the present and in view of the future—this is what we call 'history'" (7; emphasis in original), and Binder draws upon José Medina's recent work to further illuminate how such history can and will be continuously critically reconstructed. In addition, she observes, such reconstruction [End Page... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Message from the EditorPiers H.G. Stephens, EditorIt is now six years since this journal’s founding editor Victoria Davion sadly succumbed to premature fatal illness and I took over her editorial duties under the most unfortunate of circumstances. I stated publicly then that Vicky’s vision for the character and purpose of the journal would remain unchanged under my watch, and in keeping with that pledge, I am now (...) pleased to announce a major expansion of our editorial board to further promote that vision.Over the past two decades, the size of our board had declined significantly as a result of retirements and mortality, and so a restoration of the previous scale of editorial support was significantly overdue. In doing this, I have sought to protect and expand our international and interdisciplinary coverage in a way that honors the focus that Vicky gave the journal from the beginning, giving space to voices from the wider communities of concern impacted by ecological destruction and incorporating a broad and inclusive but critically engaged approach to the philosophical issues involved. Our new board includes members from a wider range of nations and disciplines, which should help us expand the journal’s reach while both manifesting and remaining faithful to the original mission that our founding editor set for it. In the process, we are welcoming a combination of new rising stars and well-established respected figures in environmental thought, and aiming to expand our sphere of influence well beyond our main subscriber base in North America. Our hope is that our new scholarly supporters will enable the journal to grow in tackling the newer and ever more complex issues and problems raised by climate change, biodiversity loss, and other ongoing ecological crises, while at the same time still remaining true to the spirit with which Vicky founded it.Readers, please join me in welcoming our new board members, who are listed in the front matter of this issue. We thank them immensely for their service and hope that their efforts will enable and support increased success for Ethics and the Environment. [End Page 1]Copyright © 2023 The Trustees of Indiana University... (shrink)

In her final book, Environmental Culture as well as elsewhere, Val Plumwood advances the view that sustainability should properly be seen as emergent from an ecofeminist partnership ethic of nourishment and support between humans and nonhuman nature, and that such an ethic must replace the characteristic institutional structures and dominant conceptions of rationality found in capitalist modernity. In making this case, Plumwood impressively charts the impact and significance of the expansionist, exclusionary models of the disembodied but appropriative self found in (...) Cartesian and Lockean thought along with the impact of private property doctrines derived from this source. However, whilst making reference to ecosocialist alternatives at the broader political level, Plumwood offers no systematic account of property that might dovetail with her wider philosophical concerns. In this paper I attempt to generate the start of such an account, drawing on Plumwood's own canon and bringing it into relationship with (1) reflections on ideas of belonging and culture drawn from a range of thinkers including Erazim Kohák, Erich Fromm, and William James, and (2) the contemporary debate over the relationship between green political thought and the liberal democratic tradition. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill is known as the first canonical Western philosopher to espouse a stationary state of economic growth, and as such he can be seen as an important totemic figure for reformist strategies in environmental ethics. However, his reputation among environmental thinkers has been rendered more ambiguous in recent years by increased attention to his essay “Nature.” The “Nature” essay has been much used lately by critics to oppose claims that independent nature may properly be seen as important in (...) any way as an ethical guide or inspiration, and that Mill’s philosophy may feasibly be viewed as pro-environmentalist. This use of Mill’s essay is mistaken, and has undermined appreciation of the potential significance of Mill’s thought for environmental philosophy. When examining the most detailed of the critical treatments of the essay, reading “Nature” as an anti-environmentalist text badly distorts the essay’s meaning by ripping it from the context of Mill’s intentions as well as from the very specific and significant historical circumstances and biographical conditions of its production. Attending properly to these factors shows that the essay is unrepresentative of Mill’s general position and rather philosophically weaker than its reputation. Reading the text as a definitive statement of Mill’s supposed anti-naturalism is thus mistaken and fails to recognize different modes and significances in “following nature,” some of which Mill supported. The “Nature” essay is an aberrant outlier in the Mill canon, and one which should no longer be allowed to undermine Mill’s strong and important environmentalist credentials. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & The Environment 25th Anniversary Issue:Introduction from the EditorPiers H.G. StephensAt the time that Vicky Davion conceived of and launched Ethics and the Environment twenty-five years ago, environmental philosophy was still struggling for acceptance and respectability as a philosophical subdiscipline. For most of the period since 1979 just one journal, Environmental Ethics, had been the primary beacon of the field, and a second, the United Kingdom-based Environmental Values, (...) had only started up in 1992. Much of the surrounding professional atmosphere at the time was less than congenial, especially in relation to any attempt to engage in philosophical radicalism via environmental thought, with much institutional pressure pushing towards seeing all the concerns of our nascent field as questions to be shuffled off into a subsection of applied ethics. As someone who was beginning my doctoral studies in Britain around that time, I well recall the pressures and the struggle for respectability that was involved, and such conditions made the bar for success in launching a new journal that much higher. Vicky's actions in beginning the journal thus required not only imagination and creativity, but a significant amount of intellectual courage.This courage manifested itself most obviously in the new ground that Ethics and the Environment set out to break. Environmental Ethics had tended to take much of its inspiration from the American conservation and preservation movements as well as debates over intrinsic value, while Environmental Values took a perspective that bridged these concerns to predominantly British political and economic theory, Ethics and the Environment responded to the institutional challenges facing the new field by broadening the range of voices and critique that environmental [End Page 1] philosophy articulated. From the earliest stages, radical perspectives that were unrepresented or underrepresented in the other journals—especially ecofeminism, deep ecology, indigenous and non-Western thought—were central to the identity and mission of Ethics and the Environment, and gave it a distinctive place and appeal. It was a risky strategy to take in the mid 1990s, yet it proved to be not only the right thing to do, broadening the debate and adding new protagonists, but also a path to produce a highly successful journal over time.Ethics and the Environment is today one of the top journals in environmental philosophy, still growing in its subscriptions and influence, and a living tribute to the quality of Vicky Davion's vision. As editor, I am often astounded at the range, diversity, and quality of the manuscript submissions we receive from a global audience, and though I remain saddened at the circumstances under which I took over the editorship, I am proud and grateful to be in charge of such a publication, and holding fast as best I can to its founding vision as the journal nears its 25th anniversary. Within the field of environmental philosophy Ethics and the Environment is deeply associated with our department and with the University of Georgia, and I hope that it may continue to be so for many a long year yet. [End Page 2]Copyright © 2020 The Trustees of Indiana University... (shrink)

Aldo Leopold once declared that there were two “spiritual dangers” in not owning a farm, with one being “the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace”. The dangers that Leopold was signaling were various, of course, but in that essay they primarily gathered around the problems caused by human distance from nature’s operations, the manners in which we can become divorced from the roots of life by a failure to (...) recognize the processes from which food and heat derive. However, Leopold did not repudiate the technologies involved in running a farm-house, and he clearly recognized that significant paradoxes are involved in the use of... (shrink)

in a stimulating and rich address, Brook Muller diagnoses some of the problems and challenges that our ecological crises bring to contemporary architecture, and attempts to break out of the conceptual straitjacket of modernism that he sees as contributing to the difficulty of producing original, promising solutions. In particular, he draws attention to the hugely pervasive role of Le Corbusier’s idea of the house as a machine for living in: here, he suggests, Le Corbusier’s enduring influence is manifested not only (...) in the “litany of environmental challenges associated with the legacy of the architectural machine” such as “climate change, massive species die-off, diminished air and water quality, and water and.. (shrink)

Though broadly philosophical reflections on nature and our place within it can be tracked to antiquity, the development of the field of environmental ethics as a distinct sub-discipline within contemporary academic philosophy has a far shorter history. Its landmark moments include the 1968 publication of Lynn White Jr’s influential critique of Christianity’s environmental record “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” J. Baird Callicott’s teaching of the world’s first course in environmental ethics in 1971 at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, (...) the pathfinding papers “Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethic?” and “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary” by the.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionPiers H.G. StephensThis special issue of Ethics and the Environment is dedicated to the philosophical contributions of our founding editor, Victoria Davion, who launched the journal in 1996 and edited it until shortly before her death in November 2017. Vicky was a pioneering figure in ecofeminist philosophy, as well as being both the first woman to become a full professor and the first to be chair of the Philosophy (...) Department here at the University of Georgia. Naturally we have endeavored to give her a suitable tribute in this issue, which we hope you will appreciate.In addition to these achievements, Vicky developed and practiced a pedagogy that consistently complemented her philosophical perspective, and in the issue's opening piece, Cecilia Herles reflects personally on the enduring legacy and influence of Vicky Davion's teaching work, and the rich heritage that has flowed out of it for her students, encouraging egalitarian dialogue, interdisciplinarity, and a practicality that extended beyond the University and into the wider community. It is surely appropriate to begin our special issue with such an appreciation of the ways that Vicky touched and lifted up so many lives.These reflections are built upon in Chaone Mallory's essay, which takes Davion's key essay "Is Ecofeminism Feminist?" as its touchstone, examining that essay's vital influence on scholarship and activism as well as its key role in defining contemporary ecofeminism itself. Drawing upon Davion's arguments, Mallory tracks a series of vital questions for the development of the field. She demonstrates how Davion's early critical insights have helped sort the wheat from the chaff in dealing with concerns such as spirituality, irrationality, essentialism, and sexism within environmentalism, concerns that made ecofeminism questionable in some feminists' eyes, and she concludes with a positive exposition as to why "all feminisms, whether named this or not, should in some sense, be eco."From here we move to Ronnie Hawkins' extensive and detailed application of Davion's work to the neurobiological, cultural, and axiological roots of our contemporary ecological situation, in which Hawkins invokes [End Page 1] and applies the insights of Davion's 2002 essay "Anthropocentrism, Artificial Intelligence, and Moral Network Theory: An Ecofeminist Perspective." Drawing upon Davion's inventive use of Val Plumwood's account of dualisms, Hawkins stresses Davion's pioneering work in avoiding the reason/nature dualistic fracture, and uses this work to critique the predominant current discourses of AI and neuroscience, in the process further expounding Davion's critiques of anthropocentrism and logocentrism. Cashing out the wider implications of Davion's perspective for our models of the mind, Hawkins connects these to Iain McGilchrist's recent work on the neuropsychology of perception and morality, arguing that this new account of the interaction of the two cerebral hemispheres and their role in generating an orientation to the world for cognition and valuing is consistent with Davion's insights, and can both help explain the environmental failings of modern Western culture and give support for non-instrumentalizing and nonanthropocentric alternatives.Finally, Trish Glazebrook and Emmanuela Opoku offer an extended ecofeminist examination of the roles, significance, dangers, and current status of environmental protectors in contemporary global environmental politics. In a paper dedicated to Davion that addresses many of her concerns with the interlocking character of forms of oppression, they systematically investigate and elucidate the importance of environmental protectors, the struggles that they engage in, the increasing threats of violence that they face, and their significance in the fight against climate change, ultimately arguing that the UN should extend explicit protection to land and environmental defenders under its human rights umbrella.We think these contributions are a fitting tribute to our founding editor, and offer you this special issue with the wish that her legacy will endure. [End Page 2]Copyright © 2018 The Trustees of Indiana University... (shrink)

‘It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broad...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Pragmatic Environmentalism: Towards a Rhetoric of Eco-Justice by Shane J. RalstonPiers H.G. Stephens (bio)Pragmatic Environmentalism: Towards a Rhetoric of Eco-Justice Shane J. Ralston. Leicester, UK: Troubadour Publishing Ltd, 2013. Xxxv + 146 pages.But no word could protect the doctrine from critics so blind to the nature of the enquiry that, when Dr. Schiller speaks of ideas ‘working’ well, the only thing they think of is their immediate (...) workings in the physical environment, their enabling us to make money, or gain some similar ‘practical’ advantage. Ideas do work thus, of course, immediately or remotely; but they work indefinitely inside the mental world also.(James, 1978: 267)Thus wrote an exasperated William James in The Meaning of Truth in 1910, attempting to refute the persistent misunderstanding of classical American pragmatism as being some form of reductive and technocratic epistemological capitalism. A century on and the misunderstandings rather depressingly continue in new contexts, most notably environmental philosophy, and we must ask “Why?” I suspect that this question has several interconnected answers: the popular non-philosophical associations of the word “pragmatism”; the mistaken tendency to equate pragmatism with runaway subjectivism; poorly informed impressions of the pragmatist criteria of “success” [End Page 123] and “workability”; and the misguided common assumptions, popularized in early environmental ethics work, that pragmatist schemes have no room for noninstrumental values (Leiss 1972; Rolston 1989; Hargrove 1989). The last of these continues despite scholarly refutations (Weston 1992; Minteer 2001; McDonald 2004; Stephens 2009 and 2012), and it is possible that a deeper reason for this obdurate resistance to pragmatist persuasion may lie in the philosophical history of persuasiveness itself. For as Shane Ralston observes in this book’s introduction, there is an intimate relationship between pragmatism and rhetoric, one which clashed with emergent Platonic ideas of truth during the very birth pangs of Western philosophy and may thus have led both to “a philosophical prejudice that rhetorical persuasion is inferior to philosophical logic” (xiv) and a related awareness that “the democratic spirit of rhetoric and its moorings in commonsense, everyday experience make it especially compatible with pragmatism” (xiv). Thus the mistaken tendency to equate philosophical pragmatism with the crassly opportunistic or the crudely populist, and the persistent failure to register pragmatist philosophy’s subtleties may well both have their roots in antique rivalries—Plato’s contrast of truth to mere popular opinion and his related condemnation of the Sophist rhetoricians. Ralston’s response to this problem is first to sensibly orientate his pragmatism to the philosophically sophisticated end of the spectrum and then employ it to enrich contemporary theory of rhetoric. He then attempts to demonstrate the potential of the new pragmatic rhetoric in a series of studies of particular areas of environ-mentalist contestation.Ralston’s variety of pragmatism is one that tries to largely eschew the generic popular associations of the word, and he notes the sensible distinction between the classical or paleo-pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey as against the contemporary neo-pragmatism of Rorty and others. Though Ralston claims to “combine elements of both classical pragmatism and neo-pragmatism to highlight how pragmatism improves discursive practice” (xvii), in practice the most significant influence on the work appears to be Dewey, and this paleo-pragmatist reviewer was pleased to see that Ralston tries to avoid the tendency to play up the managerialist aspects of pragmatism in favor of “philosophical pragmatism’s other rich resources” such as “its fallibilism, experimentalism, and meliorism” (xxv). The aim of connecting up these pragmatist resources to rhetoric is to show that “a deeply pragmatic rhetoric, once introduced into environmental communication, has the potential to transform the way environmental activists speak about their [End Page 124] methods and goals, moving them toward what I call a rhetoric of eco-justice” (xxx), a rhetoric which can displace the current focus on value theory because it “offers a superior route toward advancing an agenda that preserves the natural environment and promotes ecological justice” (xxxi).In attempting to demonstrate these declared goals, the main body of the book is organized into five chapters. In Chapter 1, Ralston outlines and distinguishes two environmental rhetorics: a rhetoric of control and a... (shrink)

Recent work by Piers Stephens has established axiological pluralism as the common element between various strands of theorizing in environmental ethics. However, a tension still exists in contemporary theories between the need for practical convergence among the values through rational argumentation and the experience of the motivational power of the value orientations in living human experience. The pragmatist phenomenological foundation for a pluralist environmental ethics developed in the philosophy of William James is consistent with the contemporary theories, while (...) potentially solving some of their tensions. In particular, the proposed approach of James adds a deeper layer of experiential values, which are not always considered in the public discursive practices and which often mobilize non‐scientific and not explicitly rational motivations and beliefs (including the environmental as well as the psychological, social, and cultural). In doing so, the phenomenological pragmatism of William James opens up an avenue for integrating experiential values into a broadened pluralist environmental ethics. (shrink)

One of the most difficult problems facing anyone who would discuss Professor Carl Hempel's thesis about explanation is the following: which of the many objections that have been made are actually relevant to the thesis? Professor Hempel has claimed that several of these objections are not relevant at all. In order to evaluate such replies, let me first state what I take to be the three claims which constitute Professor Hempel's thesis.His first claim is that all adequate scientific explanations possess (...) a certain property:... all scientific explanations and their everyday counterparts claim or presuppose at least implicitly the deductive or inductive subsumability of whatever is to be explained under general laws or theoretical principles. (shrink)