•  62
    Toward a Jamesian Environmental Philosophy
    Environmental Ethics 31 (3): 227-244. 2009.
    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 h…Read more
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    Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century by Robin Attfield
    Ethics and the Environment 20 (2): 104-111. 2015.
    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 environmen…Read more
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    Plumwood, property, selfhood and sustainability
    Ethics and the Environment 14 (2). 2009.
    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,…Read more
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    Nature, Purity, Ontology
    Environmental Values 9 (3): 267-294. 2000.
    Standard defences of preservationism, and of the intrinsic value of nature more generally, are vulnerable to at least three objections. The first of these comes from social constructivism, the second from the claim that it is incoherent to argue that nature is both 'other' and something with which we can feel unity, whilst the third links defences of nature to authoritarian objectivism and dangerously misanthropic normative dichotomies which set pure nature against impure humanity. I argue that …Read more
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    Tribute for Professor Victoria Davion
    Environmental Ethics 39 (3): 242-242. 2017.
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    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…Read more
  •  19
    Negotiating the Value of Values
    Environmental Values 25 (2): 125-130. 2016.
    ‘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...
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    On the Nature of “Nature”
    Environmental Ethics 37 (3): 359-376. 2015.
    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 impo…Read more
  •  19
    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…Read more
  •  17
    Norton Versus Callicott on Interpreting Aldo Leopold: A Jamesian View
    In Ben A. Minteer & Sahotra Sarkar (eds.), A Sustainable Philosophy—the Work of Bryan Norton, Springer Verlag. pp. 113-133. 2018.
    Since Bryan Norton first advocated an American pragmatist reading of Aldo Leopold’s work in 1988, he has been debating with J. Baird Callicott over interpretation of Leopold’s development of the land ethic. In this chapter I give an overview of this debate, defending the general outlines of Norton’s position by bringing in new interpretative work of my own. I argue firstly that Norton is correct to see a Jamesian pragmatist influence on Leopold, but maintain that this is best read as deriving fr…Read more
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    Pragmatism, Pluralism, Empiricism and Relational Values
    Environmental Values 30 (6): 661-668. 2021.
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    Alienation and Nature in Environmental Philosophy by Simon Hailwood
    Ethics and the Environment 22 (1): 111-118. 2017.
    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…Read more
  •  8
    Introduction
    Ethics and the Environment 23 (2): 1. 2018.
    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 Depart…Read more
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    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 …Read more
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    Vladimir Bibikhin, The Woods
    Environmental Values 30 (6): 783-785. 2021.
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    Book Review: The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right (review)
    Environmental Values 33 (1): 90-92. 2024.
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    A Message from the Editor
    Ethics and the Environment 28 (2): 1-1. 2023.
    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 announc…Read more