Content area
Full text
Anthony Weston, The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher: Essays from the Edges of Environmental Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), xiii + 196 pp.
The most striking thing about Anthony Weston's book is its unusual title, which is not at all to say that there aren't other striking things about the work, but only that when such archaic spellings are featured prominently on the cover of a book, one naturally wonders what gives. As it happens, this question is never completely answered by Weston, but is instead addressed only tangentially, in reference to the incompleteness, not the incompleatness, of environmental philosophy.
Fortunately, archaism is no match for modernity. A quick Internet search yields at least one satisfying possibility. The "incompleat" in the eco-philosopher appears to be a reference to a 1972 Pete Seeger novel, The Incompleat Folksinger, in which Pete Seeger rather randomly rollicks through the history of folk music, much in the way that Weston rollicks through the history of environmental philosophy. And that, I should think, is a great place to begin this review.
The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher has no story line. It has no plot, not even a Communist Plot (cf. the aforementioned Seeger opus - you can't make this stuff up, readers!). It is a collection of eight previously published essays, bookended by one introduction and one appendix. Over the course of this exploratory foray, Weston attempts to drag philosophy back into the real world, to get philosophers to think more pragmatically about environmental issues: to embrace, once and for all, a naturalistic conception - a Deweyan, pragmatic conception - of value as process. As he eloquently says in the introduction, "[vjalues are not fragile or rare or delicate or endangered. We do not live in an axiological desert but in a rain forest. Everywhere the air is thick with them" (1).
As is customary in collected works, the substantive argument begins not in the first but in the second chapter, following immediately from Weston's overview and introduction. This chapter offers the reader a rough background in environmental ethics, as Weston wonders out loud what it might mean to "think ecologically." There he provides an overview of contemporary nonanthropocentrism, in which he suggests that even some of the most aggressive nonanthropocentric theories...