The aim of this paper is to investigate how alternative land ethics of agricultural stakeholders may help explain recent land use changes. The paper first explores the historical development of the land ethic concept in the United States and how those ethics have impacted land use policy and use of private lands. Secondly, primary data gathered from semi-structured interviews of farmers, ranchers, and influential stakeholders are then analyzed using stakeholder analysis methods to identify major factors considered in land use decisions, (...) priorities of factors of each group, and to define relevant mental models describing each group’s view of the land ethic concept. Results show that these stakeholder groups prioritize land use factors qualitatively differently and possess strikingly different land ethics. It is concluded that shifts in stakeholder land ethics have contributed to recent land use changes. Lastly, we discuss how current agricultural policy sends mixed signals about preferred land use and the potential ramifications based on the different land ethics we’ve described. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Bodyheartminding” (xin 心): Reconceiving the Inner Self and the Outer World in the Language of Holographic Focus and FieldRoger T. Amesin body consciousness: a philosophy of mindfulness and somaesthetics, Richard Shusterman expands upon a professional oeuvre in which his exploration of the phenomenon of “body consciousness” has effected nothing less than a somatic turn in the contemporary Western philosophical narrative.1 But his contribution does not end there. Over the (...) past two decades, the reach and influence of his “somaesthetics” has been extended to the gates of China. Indeed, it has become a theme engaged by scholars of China’s indigenous philosophical traditions, thus providing an opportunity for a further edifying conversation between the Chinese and Western philosophical traditions.2 And it is this conversation, as it has been inspired by Shusterman’s work, that I propose to join in this short essay.In Body Consciousness, Shusterman tells the story of how John Dewey advances the pragmatic project of not only understanding the body better, but indeed of applying the Alexander Technique as his way of using his own body properly.3 Just as Dewey has been a prominent resource for Shusterman in his development of somaesthetics, for Dewey in turn, it was William James’s Principles of Psychology that was a self-confessed inspiration for the development of his own evolving interpretation of pragmatism.4 Indeed, one way of reading Dewey’s philosophical career and his thirty-seven-volume opus is that it is a sustained effort to take the radical “stream-of-consciousness” insights developed in James’s Principles to their logical, systematic conclusion. In pursuing this project, while appreciative, Dewey is at times impatient with James’s dualistic lapses in which he continues to separate individuals from community, mind from body, emotions from intellect, agents from actions, and theory from practice. Dewey takes these unfortunate reversions to old ways of thinking as serving only to confound James’s holistic doctrines of pure experience and radical empiricism. Given Dewey’s own postulate of [End Page 100] immediate and continuous empiricism, one way of tracking his journey from having been inspired by James’s biological naturalism to achieving his own philosophical coherence is to register his unrelenting aversion to dualism in any form.But Dewey himself was not always consistent in this respect. Shusterman gives an account of the early neo-Hegelian Dewey who, affirming the familiar transcendent conception of soul we associate with idealism, unsurprisingly embraces a clear soul and body dualism. And in spite of the philosophically mature Dewey’s best efforts to think “process,” he has no choice but to use both a language and a grammar freighted with substance ontology that resists his more holistic insights. On occasion, even while trying to remain consistent in his thinking, Dewey seems to fall victim to terminology that if not dualistic is at best ambiguous. Dewey’s struggle against this problem of equivocation is particularly apparent in some of the language he appeals to in attempting to put the Humpty Dumpty of mind and body together again. In his effort to register the irreducible continuity and inseparability of the nonanalytic abstractions we differentiate as body and mind—the ontological givenness or “hadness” of “bodyminding”—Dewey still at times invokes terms such as “combination,” “integration,” “unity,” and so on, that take as their suppressed premise “two things becoming one.” By way of contrast, in the correlative vocabulary of Chinese process cosmology, expressions such as yinyang 陰陽, the natural/cultural and the human (tianren 天人), and knowing and doing (zhixing 知行), primacy is given to vital relationality and the continuity it entails. It is not putting two things together that is referenced with these binomials, but the deepening of the horizon of constitutive, internal relationships that transforms the two aspects of the same phenomenon qualitatively into harmonics (he 和) for yinyang, sagacity (sheng 聖) for tianren, and acting wisely (zhi 智) for zhixing. In each instance, the two aspects themselves are simply conceptual abstractions from a complex relational process. The proper and effective measure (du 度) sought in this Confucian cosmology is not quantitatively more or less of two distinct things—taking mind and body as our example—but rather a qualitative and transformative change that... (shrink)

I argue that its appearing to you that P does not provide justification for believing that P unless you have independent justification for the denial of skeptical alternatives – hypotheses incompatible with P but such that if they were true, it would still appear to you that P. Thus I challenge the popular view of ‘dogmatism,’ according to which for some contents P, you need only lack reason to suspect that skeptical alternatives are true, in order for an experience as (...) of P to justify belief that P. I pursue three lines of objection to dogmatism, having to do with probabilistic reasoning, considerations of future or hypothetically available justification, and epistemic circularity. I briefly sketch a fall-back position which avoids the problems raised. (shrink)

Despite the declarations of international documents on minority language rights, provision is patchy for supporting minority languages in the UK, where since the 1980s governments have deliberately or unwittingly greatly raised the profile and comparative standing of English. The partial exception to this trend has been the treatment of indigenous/regional minority languages, stimulated by policies of devolution intended to revive or create a sense of national identity, and to redress perceived historic linguistic injustices. In a multicultural state or region these (...) apparently reasonable goals appear to conflict with current views of citizenship that argue for inclusiveness and equal treatment for all under the law. In particular, the question arises why indigenous minority languages should receive official support and funding that is denied to speakers of minority ethnic languages. In this article, I examine various justifications offered for this, including higher population levels, the geographical concentration of indigenous speakers, the long historical ties between regional language and culture, and the notion of promotional rights. I attempt to show each argument lacks force and ignores the fact of natural language change. I argue for an approach to indigenous languages that weights support and funding according to a range of factors including the number of minority speakers, their perceived need and the benefits that would flow from funding. Support from the local community and private sources could also be encouraged. (shrink)

Michael Bergmann claims that all versions of epistemic internalism face an irresolvable dilemma. We show that there are many plausible versions of internalism that falsify this claim. First, we demonstrate that there are versions of ‘‘weak awareness internalism’’ that, contra Bergmann, do not succumb to the ‘‘Subject’s Perspective Objection’’ horn of the dilemma. Second, we show that there are versions of ‘‘strong awareness internalism’’ that do not fall prey to the dilemma’s ‘‘vicious regress’’ horn. We note along the way that (...) these versions of internalism do not, in avoiding one horn of the dilemma, succumb to the dilemma’s other horn. The upshot is that internalists have many available strategies for avoiding dilemmatic defeat. (shrink)

Le pédagogue Antoine de La Garanderie (1920-2010) laisse un héritage intellectuel particulièrement riche et stimulant. Le rayonnement de sa pensée au cours des trois dernières décennies, tant en France qu'à l'étranger, et son influence sur les pratiques pédagogiques, formatives, voire thérapeutiques, font de lui l'une des figures marquantes de notre culture contemporaine. Cet ouvrage explore trois grands champs de réflexion et de recherche : le premier concerne la validité et la pertinence, au plan épistémologique, des recherches qu'il a conduites, désignées (...) sous le terme générique de " Gestion mentale ", et en référence à d'autres courants de pensée ; le second aborde l'orientation générale des expérimentations pédagogiques ou didactiques auxquelles ces recherches ont donné lieu et dont il convient d'évaluer la portée et la valeur, tant heuristiques que praxéologiques ; le troisième relève des fondements proprement anthropologiques où s'enracinent ses concepts et ses propositions et qu'il importe autant de dévoiler que de situer : sa foi en l'éducabilité, sa conception de l'évolution et du progrès. (shrink)

One of the signal developments in contemporary criticism over the past several years has been the ascendancy of the colonial paradigm. In conjunction with this new turn, Frantz Fanon has now been reinstated as a global theorist, and not simply by those engaged in Third World or subaltern studies. In a recent collection centered on British romanticism, Jerome McGann opens a discussion of William Blake and Ezra Pound with an extended invocation of Fanon. Donald Pease has used Fanon to open (...) an attack on Stephen Greenblatt’s reading of the Henriad and the interdisciplinary practices of the new historicism. And Fanon, and published interpretations of Fanon, have become regularly cited in the rereading of the Renaissance that have emerged from places like Sussex, Essex, and Birmingham.1My intent is not to offer a reading of Fanon to supplant these others, but to read, even if summarily, some of these readings of Fanon. By focusing on successive appropriations of this figure, as both totem and text, I think we can chart out an itinerary through contemporary colonial discourse theory. I want to stress, then, that my ambitions here are extremely limited: what follows may be a prelude to a reading of Fanon, but does not even begin that task itself.2 1. See Jerome McGann, “The Third World of Criticism,” in Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History, ed. Marjorie Levinson et al., pp. 85-107, and Donald Pease, “Toward a Sociology of Literary Knowledge: Greenblatt, Colonialism, and the New Historicism,” in Consequences of Theory, ed. Barbara Johnson and Jonathan Arac.2. A properly contextualized reading of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the text to which I most frequently recur, should situate it in respect to such germinal works as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question Juive, Dominique O. Mannoni’s Psychologie de la colonisation, Germaine Guex’s La Névrose d’abandon, as well as many lesser known works. But this is only to begin to sketch out the challenge of rehistoricizing Fanon. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is coeditor of Transition, a quarterly review, and the author of Figures in Black and The Signifying Monkey, which received an American Book Award. (shrink)

I believe that Tom is the proud father of a baby boy. Why do I think his child is a boy? A natural answer might be that I remember that his name is ‘Owen’ which is usually a boy’s name. Here I’ve given information that might be part of a causal explanation of my believing that Tom’s baby is a boy. I do have such a memory and it is largely what sustains my conviction. But I haven’t given you just (...) any causally relevant information, I’ve given my grounds for my belief. I’ve given reasons that might justify me in supposing that Tom’s baby is a boy. Less naturally, the question might be taken as a request for a broader causal explanation of my holding this belief. Appropriate answers might cite all manner of facts concerning the evolution of the human race, why I chose to pursue philosophy and hence came to know Tom, the mechanisms of email transmission, the firing of various neurons, the circumstances of concept formation as a result of which I’m able to grasp the thought that Tom’s baby is a boy, and so on. It is an interesting question what distinguishes the narrower set of answers that I first suggested. I won’t pursue that here. I assume you have a good enough sense of the distinction I’m drawing. We might call the narrower set of answers justifying reasons, the kind of reasons I might cite in justifying my belief. Answers of the first sort are clearly relevant to epistemological evaluation. In assessing whether you know p or are rational in believing it to the degree you do, I will naturally want to consider what reasons you have for your belief. In deliberating myself about whether to believe p, in seeking an answer to the question of whether p, I will naturally consider what reasons or grounds I have to suppose that p. But what I want to focus on here is how explanations of the broader sort bear on such questions as whether to believe p. From a third-person perspective we can ask, ‘In assessing the epistemic status of S’s belief that p, what is the relevance of causal information that lies outside of the realm of justifying reasons?’ From the first-person standpoint we can ask ‘In seeking to answer whether p, how should such causal information affect my deliberations?’ At first it might seem that such broader causal information could have little relevance if any. Like any belief my belief that p can be traced back to innumerable causes from far and wide.. (shrink)

This is a three-part exchange on the relationship between belief and credence. It begins with an opening essay by Roger Clarke that argues for the claim that the notion of credence generalizes the notion of belief. Julia Staffel argues in her reply that we need to distinguish between mental states and models representing them, and that this helps us explain what it could mean that belief is a special case of credence. Roger Clarke's final essay reflects on the (...) compatibility of the previously discussed views with dualist and monist interpretations of our mental states and our ways of modeling them. (shrink)

Introduction -- The mathematical roots of the concept of analogy -- Aristotle : the uses of analogy -- Aristotle : analogy and language -- Thomas Aquinas -- Immanuel Kant -- Karl Barth -- Final reflections.

Can human beings be free and responsible if there is an all-powerful God? Anselm of Canterbury offers viable answers to questions which have plagued religious people for at least two thousand years. Katherin Rogers examines Anselm's reconciliation of human free will and divine omnipotence in the context of current philosophical debates.

Introduction -- Anselm's classical theism -- The Augustinian legacy -- The purpose, definition, and structure of free choice -- Alternative possibilities and primary agency -- The causes of sin and the intelligibility problem -- Creaturely freedom and God as Creator Omnium -- Grace and free will -- Foreknowledge, freedom, and eternity : part I, the problem and historical background -- Foreknowledge, freedom, and eternity : part II, Anselm's solution -- The freedom of God.

Chronological explanation of physics from early history through current studies geared to lay readers with limited mathematical training.

The preface paradox does not show that it can be rational to have inconsistent beliefs, because preface writers do not have inconsistent beliefs. I argue, first, that a fully satisfactory solution to the preface paradox would have it that the preface writer's beliefs are consistent. The case here is on basic intuitive grounds, not the consequence of a theory of rationality or of belief. Second, I point out that there is an independently motivated theory of belief – sensitivism – which (...) allows such a solution. I sketch a sensitivist account of the preface writer's doxastic state. (shrink)

A substantial body of recent philosophy envisages a close, congenial relationship between blame and morality. It has been posited, assumed or argued, for instance, that blame is responsive to moral...

Starting from an examination of foundational issues, the book covers a range of topics, including animals, agency, enjoyment, the good life, contemplation, ...

My intention is to show that, starting from an empiricist philosophy of mind, it is possible to give a systematic account of aesthetic experience. I argue that empiricism involves a certain theory of meaning and truth; one problem is to show how this theory is compatible with the activity of aesthetic judgment. I investigate and reject two attempts to delimit the realm of the aesthetic: one in terms of the individuality of the aesthetic object, and the other in terms of (...) 'aesthetic properties'. I go on to argue that aesthetic descriptions must not be thought to ascribe properties to their objects, and I show how the suggestion that they are non-descriptive need not conflict with the empiricist view of meaning. The problem is then seen to lie with the analysis of the 'acceptance-conditions' of aesthetic descriptions. I counter certain idealist objections to this approach, and then present a theory of imagination, in terms of which the acceptance conditions of aesthetic judgments may be described. This theory attempts to explain how the element of thought in aesthetic appreciation may become inseparable from an experience of its object, and how the aesthetic emotions are both like and unlike their equivalents in life. The first part concludes with an analysis of the general conditions of aesthetic experience. I try to show that aesthetic experience can be described in terms of certain 'formal' properties, independently of its material object. In the second part I am concerned to show that this empiricist theory of aesthetics does not, like most empiricist theories, make nonsense of our appreciation of art. First, I attempt to show that 'understanding' art is not merely a cognitive process, but involves certain experiences that can be accounted for in terms of the previous theory. I then analyse the concepts of representation and expression, and in the course of this analysis I attempt to refute what I take to be the most serious rival analysis of our appreciation of art - the semantic theory. (shrink)

Beyond geometry : Leibniz and the science of law -- The force of law : will -- Leibniz's systema iuris -- From the gesetzbuch to the landrecht : the ALR and the triumph of legality -- The rule of law : the Crown Prince lectures and the grounding of legality in order and security -- From reason to history : Savigny's system and the rise of social legal science -- The Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (BGB) of 1900 : positive legal science and (...) the end of justice. (shrink)

Abstract Scientific advances have made the end of life into the primary concern of medicine. But medicine also postpones the end of life, often until the time when we no longer have the mental and physical capacity to deal with it. I argue that we need to develop Nietzsche's idea of timely death, in order to find a moral basis for health care at the end of life, and that the crucial factor is the cultivation of the virtues that would (...) enable us to live in another and more reckless way. We should look on the problem not from the first-person point of view, but from the perspective of the other, and ask ourselves what is most admirable in another person, in his or her attitude to death. The point of timely death is to make death into the completion of life, where life is understood as a moral rather than a biological idea. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Understanding and Reality Tradition and Interpretation Forms of Realism Works cited.

Gödel appears to have believed strongly that the human mind cannot be explained in terms of any kind of computational physics, but he remained cautious in formulating this belief as a rigorous consequence of his incompleteness theorems. In this chapter, I discuss a modification of standard Gödel-type logical arguments, these appearing to strengthen Gödel’s conclusions, and attempt to provide a persuasive case in support of his standpoint that the actions of the mind must transcend computation. It appears that Gödel did (...) not consider the possibility that the laws of physics might themselves involve noncomputational procedures; accordingly, he found himself driven to the conclusion that mentality must lie beyond the actions of the physical brain. My own arguments, on the other hand, are from the scientific standpoint that the mind is a product of the brain’s physical activity. Accordingly, there must be something in the physical actions of the world that itself transcends computation. We do not appear to find such noncomputational action in the known laws of physics, however, so we must seek it in currently undiscovered laws going beyond presently accepted physical theory. I argue that the only plausibly relevant gap in current understanding lies in a fundamental incompleteness in quantum theory, which reveals itself only with significant mass displacements between quantum states (“Schrödinger’s cats”). I contend that the need for new physics enters when gravitational effects just begin to play a role. In a scheme developed jointly with Stuart Hameroff, this has direct relevance within neuronal microtubules, and I describe this (still speculative) scheme in the following. (shrink)

A-t-on le droit de croire en l'existence de Dieu? Non, répondent ceux qui veulent des preuves. Oui, affirme ce livre, car nous avons le droit de croire même sans justification épistémologique. Cela n'a rien d'intellectuellement honteux, contrairement à ce que disent certains philosophes, en parlant d'une éthique des croyances Une nouvelle question se pose alors : a-t-on le droit de croire avoir reçu une révélation et prétendre connaître ainsi la vérité? Non, répondent ceux pour lesquels la vérité ne peut pas (...) être donnée par Dieu dans la Bible. Oui, affirme ce livre, et, qui plus est, une épistémologie peut défendre la rationalité de notre croyance à la révélation. Dès lors, peut-on faire comme si les affirmations du Credo étaient des fictions? Est-il vrai que la religion est avant tout une affaire pratique et une forme de vie? Non, répond ce livre : les arguments en faveur d'une conception non réaliste de la religion sont faibles ; en revanche, le réalisme théologique peut être défendu. Renouvelant ainsi la traditionnelle question de la relation entre foi et raison, ce livre discute aussi bien les thèses de saint Thomas, de John Locke, du cardinal Newman et de Ludwig Wittgenstein, que celles de philosophes analytiques contemporains de la religion comme Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Peter van Inwagen ou Linda Zagzebski. (shrink)

Sexual experimentation, living together, raising children outside of marriage, remarriage after divorce, and same-sex relationships...These behaviours have become common in the wider society as well as among Christians and Catholic Christians. Not only do they think and act differently than the official Church teaching, but they do so convinced that they are acting rightly. This challenges ethics to respond by what can be called an 'ethics of mercy', by meeting people where they are and helping them to grow towards the (...) fullness of life and love. Such a pastoral and educational ethics of growth should dare to stand within the tension between what is desirable and what is attainable, without surrendering the 'pro-vocative' idea of conjugal covenant as the basis for the family. Mercy is needed not only after ethics but in ethics. In harmony with Pope Francis's plea for a 'gospel of mercy', this book seeks a middle way between merciless rigourism and relativising subjectivism. It proposes an ethics of redemption that accompanies people on their way to meaningful living and loving, grounded in a spirituality that springs from the salvation offered in Jesus. (shrink)

In addition the book also includes a good number of unpublished essays.

Winner of the Wolf Prize for his contribution to our understanding of the universe, Penrose takes on the question of whether artificial intelligence will ever ...

This paper seeks critically to elucidate Hume’s views on pleasure and the good, in particular his evaluative hedonism, and to show that evaluative hedonism is in certain respects at least as significant a component of his philosophical ethics as sentimentalism. The first section explains his notion of pleasure, and how it is, in an important sense, prior to desire. The following two sections show how this conception of pleasure and its relation to desire leads Hume to accept evaluative hedonism, as (...) well as a form of psychological hedonism, and to give pleasure a key role in his metaethics. The paper ends, as do both the Treatise and the second Enquiry, with the distinction—a false one, according to Hume—between virtues and natural abilities, and an attempt to bring out the implicit challenge Hume is making to non-hedonist accounts of value, especially those that postulate “moral” value. (shrink)

The last few years have seen a remarkable revival of interest in the virtues, which have regained their central role in moral philosophy. This thought-provoking new collection is a much-needed survey of virtue ethics and virtue theory. The specially commissioned articles by an international team of philosophers represent the state of the art in this subject and will set the agenda for future work in the area. The contributors--including Lawrence Blum, John Cottingham, Julia Driver, Rosalind Hursthouse, Terence Irwin, Susan Moller (...) Okin, Onora O'Neill, Michael Slote, Michael Stocker, and David Wiggins--cover practical virtue ethics, ancient views of the virtues, impartiality and partiality, Kant, utilitarianism, human nature, natural and artificial virtues, virtue and the good life, the vices, emotions, politics, feminism, moral education, and community. (shrink)