The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher: Essays from the Edges of Environmental Ethics

by Anthony Weston

Overview

This collection of germinal work in the field by Anthony Weston presents his pragmatic environmental philosophy, calling for reconstruction and imagination rather than deconstruction and analysis. It is a philosopher's invitation to environmental ethics in an unexpectedly inviting and down-to-earth key. On the pragmatic view advanced here, environmental values are thoroughly natural—what else could they be?—and are open-ended and in flux. Rather than passing judgment on the world as it is, we are called to rediscover and remake the world as it might be. We require an environmental etiquette more than a formal ethic; an etiquette whose development must be an ongoing process; and a process in turn that is genuinely multicentric, challenging us to negotiate our place among the exuberant variety of living and other forms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791477274
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	01/15/2009
Series:	SUNY series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	210
File size:	377 KB

About the Author

Anthony Weston is Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Elon University. His many books include A Rulebook for Arguments, Fourth Edition; A Twenty-first Century Ethical Toolbox, Second Edition; and How to Re-imagine the World: A Pocket Guide for Practical Visionaries.

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Introduction

2. Before Environmental Ethics

3. Self-Validating Reduction: A Theory of the Devaluation of Nature

4. Environmental Ethics as Environmental Etiquette (with Jim Cheney)

5. Multicentrism: A Manifesto

6. De-Anthropocentrizing the World: Environmental Ethics as a Design Challenge

7. What If Teaching Went Wild?

8. Galapagos Stories: Evolution, Creation, and the Odyssey of Species

9. Eco-Philosophy in Space

Appendix: Complete Publication List
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Over the last two decades Anthony Weston's work has made a singular contribution to environmental philosophy. He has inspired a new generation of self-styled 'environmental pragmatists,' including myself, and encouraged others more still to awake from their dogmatic slumbers and tackle the harder problems of forming a more responsible relationship with the nonhuman world than had previously been addressed. Environmental philosophy would be a far poorer field without Weston's influence." — Andrew Light, George Mason University and Center for American Progress

From the Publisher