Pub Date : 2003-08-01DOI: 10.1080/1090377032000114615
Shannon Kincaid
The test of civilization is the power of drawing the most benefit out of cities." Ralph Waldo Emerson What is the role of the urban experience in the construction of American democratic ideals? By looking at the disparate visions of a just society advanced by Jefferson and Hamilton, this paper will attempt to provide an account of the historical role of the urban experience in the construction of the American vision of democracy. Then, through the works of John Dewey and Lewis Mumford (and Robert Westbrook's account of their continuing disagreements), the essay will address some of the issues stemming from the role of urban experience in the processes of moral development. Then, through the work of Whitman, it will be argued that the urban experience is a necessary condition for the adequate development of democratic ideals. The essay will conclude with a brief analysis of some of the important elements of the urban experience, and their respective contributions to the construction of democratic values.
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Pub Date : 2003-08-01DOI: 10.1080/1090377032000114679
Thomas M. Alexander
Native Pragmatism by Scott Pratt joins a small but significant body of work by philosophers dealing with Native American thought. It is one of the first major works by a professional philosopher to address directly the question of Native American Philosophy since 1953, when The World’s Rim by Hartley Burr Alexander appeared, fourteen years after his death. There have been of course, philosophical works on Native American subjects by people outside professional philosophy itself, including many works by Native writers, like Vine Deloria Jr., or by anthropologists like Dennis Tedlock. But the problems and issues of Native people writing about their own traditions or of anthropologists writing about other peoples’ traditions are different from those of philosophers. First, at the core of Western philosophy’s own “myth” of its origins is that it begins with a rejection of myth and its “tradition” has been to critique tradition. Thus world-views that operate comfortably within the symbolism of myth and exhibit reverence toward tradition are almost excommunicate from the start. Second, Anglo-American philosophy has so over-whelmed other modes of reflective praxis in the English-speaking world with its various scientistic paradigms, that anything dealing with deep issues of embedded cultural thinking, philosophical anthropology, or pluralistic modes of meaning and rationality are not even on the “map” of Philosophy. Finally, there is the subculture of “American Philosophy” which has its own myth and tradition of its origins within European philosophy and which has, in spite of its commitments to pluralism, “lived experience,” and culturally contextualized reflection, resisted the idea of “Native American Philosophy” as part of its own project. Native Pragmatism is a direct challenge to this last set of assumptions, as will be evident as I give a synopsis of the book’s main arguments and appeals to evidence. Before I do so, I want to ask you to reflect a moment on what it means to “do” philosophy here in North America—that is to say upon the ground of a holocaust far more dreadful than any seen since. Is it not “disembodied” in time and place to pretend
{"title":"Thinking in place: Comments on Scott Pratt's Native Pragmatism","authors":"Thomas M. Alexander","doi":"10.1080/1090377032000114679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1090377032000114679","url":null,"abstract":"Native Pragmatism by Scott Pratt joins a small but significant body of work by philosophers dealing with Native American thought. It is one of the first major works by a professional philosopher to address directly the question of Native American Philosophy since 1953, when The World’s Rim by Hartley Burr Alexander appeared, fourteen years after his death. There have been of course, philosophical works on Native American subjects by people outside professional philosophy itself, including many works by Native writers, like Vine Deloria Jr., or by anthropologists like Dennis Tedlock. But the problems and issues of Native people writing about their own traditions or of anthropologists writing about other peoples’ traditions are different from those of philosophers. First, at the core of Western philosophy’s own “myth” of its origins is that it begins with a rejection of myth and its “tradition” has been to critique tradition. Thus world-views that operate comfortably within the symbolism of myth and exhibit reverence toward tradition are almost excommunicate from the start. Second, Anglo-American philosophy has so over-whelmed other modes of reflective praxis in the English-speaking world with its various scientistic paradigms, that anything dealing with deep issues of embedded cultural thinking, philosophical anthropology, or pluralistic modes of meaning and rationality are not even on the “map” of Philosophy. Finally, there is the subculture of “American Philosophy” which has its own myth and tradition of its origins within European philosophy and which has, in spite of its commitments to pluralism, “lived experience,” and culturally contextualized reflection, resisted the idea of “Native American Philosophy” as part of its own project. Native Pragmatism is a direct challenge to this last set of assumptions, as will be evident as I give a synopsis of the book’s main arguments and appeals to evidence. Before I do so, I want to ask you to reflect a moment on what it means to “do” philosophy here in North America—that is to say upon the ground of a holocaust far more dreadful than any seen since. Is it not “disembodied” in time and place to pretend","PeriodicalId":431617,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy & Geography","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127095235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2003-08-01DOI: 10.1080/1090377032000114606
T. C. Hilde
Philosophers have written about cities for over 2000 years, most often metaphorically. The great works on cities and urban studies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, were not penned by professional philosophers. These works were written by sociologists, architects, urban planners, journalists, a court reporter, cultural critics, activists, and historians. Perhaps philosophers, in the end, have little to say about cities. Perhaps Plato’s great republic was the definitive statement from the philosopher, one that laid out the largely idealizing route philosophers would take in regard to natural and artifactual environments, as well as in regard to their own discipline. Certainly, philosophers today often feel obliged to (and are asked to) explain and justify what they do to those outside of the discipline. And, certainly, today there is a large amount of interdisciplinary work that blurs the edges of the fields of not only philosophy, but also history, political science, sociology, anthropology, and so on. Pragmatism, the approach taken by the writers in this issue, has generally welcomed this blurring—the more resources one can bring to inquiry, the better. But philosophers are nonetheless uniquely positioned to examine ethical, aesthetic, political, and epistemic aspects—traditional philosophical concerns—of not only environmental issues, but also of the increasingly important sphere of urban environmental studies. It is therefore curious that with the now 30-year-old philosophical field of environmental ethics, philosophical works on urban environments have appeared on the scene only very recently, in the mid-1990s. After all, the most immediate environment for human beings is increasingly the urban environment. Some 300 cities worldwide today have a population of over one million people, and thirteen have populations over 10 million. Philosophers are capable of and should begin inquiry from the conditions and exigencies of living, and this living is also increasingly done in urban environments, for better or worse. But many of the kinds of arguments that have dominated environmental ethics—many of which are at practical, philosophical, and ideological impasses—do not translate clearly into urban settings. For example, debates over the intrinsic or instrumental value of nature are problematized in urban settings by the fact that cities are complex historical constructions for dynamic human uses which, in whole or in part, may nevertheless be appreciated for their intrinsic merits. So, perhaps the urban
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Pub Date : 2003-08-01DOI: 10.1080/1090377032000114660
S. Elden
Although Jeff Malpas is rather critical of my book Mapping the Present, he is simultaneously generous in acknowledging what he sees as its important aspects. Indeed, I hope that it is fair to say that his critique is based on the premise that the book is worth engaging with. Given Malpas’ own significance for thinking the relation between philosophy and geography I am extremely grateful for the time he has spent on this. I am equally appreciative of the chance to both accept his criticism and defend my work, and to offer some suggestions for how the project it outlines might be improved and continued in the future. Malpas is right to point out the importance of the argument concerning the relationship between Heidegger and Foucault, and he helpfully sets out how I go about making the argument for their close relation. Although he correctly suggests that it is not “historical and biographical in focus,” the reading of Heidegger is set up precisely in such a way as to allow us to see how key conceptual terminology, references and issues in Foucault could have emerged. And Malpas is correct to note that the book simultaneously seeks to stress the importance of the concepts of space and place, both in relation to their role in Heidegger and Foucault’s work, and in social theory more generally. This allows him to succinctly outline the “three elements” of my work. The attempt to do these three things is, I think, perhaps both a strength and a weakness to the book. While I hope it has added to the appeal of the book, it inevitably sets up limitations to the depth of argument—each of these issues could perhaps have been a book in themselves. This perhaps explains many of the criticisms leveled against the book by Malpas. Though I do not intend to be exhaustive in either my outlining of these criticisms or in my response to them, let me note and reply to those I think are most important and challenging. Several of Malpas’ criticisms are related to the Heidegger part of the book. His most substantial one seems to be that I do not “provide an account of the way in which the concepts of space and place are themselves articulated as part of Heidegger’s overall vision or the way in which they connect up with other key concepts.” Following from this, he contends that several key issues are neglected—the link between Augenblick and Ereignis; the relation between the historical and the temporal to place; between place and
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Pub Date : 2003-08-01DOI: 10.1080/1090377032000114677
S. Pratt
I am grateful to Alexander and Holton for their insightful engagement with Native Pragmatism. They have raised key issues about the book, but more importantly, they have taken up what I see as the central issue of the work: rethinking the history of American thought against a background of pluralism. For most of its professional career, philosophy in America has uncritically viewed itself as a product of European thought relocated to a “new world.” While the European tradition was indeed brought to the Western hemisphere, it is also not the case that it arrived in an empty world or a world populated by people from whom nothing could be learned. The European tradition arrived in a long-occupied place, populated by people who had survived and in most cases flourished in a context of cultural diversity and who already had well-established ways of thinking and interacting with each other and their environments. The immigration of Europeans marked new interactions framed on one side by what Europeans brought from Europe and on the other by indigenous strategies for interacting with strangers. Native Pragmatism sets out to problematize the received histories of American philosophy by examining a range of the interactions between immigrant Europeans and Native North Americans and to suggest a particular line of development. Alexander and Holton, even as they critique the work, nevertheless engage in the broader questions of how we understand American philosophy and make a significant contribution to expanding the inquiry that Native Pragmatism begins. The two commentaries raise a large number of issues that deserve attention. Given space constraints I will try to focus on the most interesting and, for Native Pragmatism, the most problematic: how to understand the interaction between Native and European America. Taken together, the two commentaries and Native Pragmatism present three strategies for carrying out this work. Holton’s is an historical approach, developed in his book, Forced Founders, that is grounded in a broad range of evidence that serves to undermine the received view of American history, especially the history of the American Revolution. Alexander, on the other hand, is skeptical about histories as a means of understanding Native American thought and suggests that we consider a comparative approach that seeks to find a common philosophical ground across apparent cultural differences. Such an approach has the advantage of widening the range of American
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Pub Date : 2003-08-01DOI: 10.1080/1090377032000114633
J. Sheppard
The nectar is in the journey, |3dotnld| ultimate goals may be illusory, nay, most likely are but a gossamer wing. Day by day, however, human life triumphs in its ineluctable capacity to hang in and make things better. Not perfect, simply better." John McDermott, Streams of Experience I investigate one manner in which classical American pragmatism might be utilized by theorists and practitioners interested in addressing urban environmental problems. Despite the widespread adoption of the sustainability moniker within the environmental movement, evidence suggests that progress toward implementing urban environmental sustain ability proposals has been minimal. To address this inaction, I undertake an analysis of the philosophy of progress guiding efforts to transition urban environments toward sustainability. I argue that one of the reasons so little has been accomplished in terms of implementing existing urban environmental sustainability proposals is that a disproportionate emphasis has been placed on values that stem from economic-centered indicators of progress. I argue that the value of progress ought to be less about how much of a certain type of economic growth sustainability proposals ultimately can generate for urban environments and more about ensuring that continual incremental societal progress takes place.
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Pub Date : 2003-08-01DOI: 10.1080/1090377032000114688
W. Holton
This is going to sound grandiose, but I really think it’s true: the work that Scott Pratt is trying to do in Native Pragmatism is at least as important and valuable as the work that was done in Philadelphia in 1776 and 1787. Not that the authors of either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution would approve of Pratt’s project. One of the ways by which the Founding Fathers and their descendants have maintained the power they seized in 1776 and secured in 1787 has been by marketing a series of conquest myths. One of these myths depicts Native Americans not only as savage but as insignificant. These myths have been used to justify the rotten treatment Indians have received since Columbus began making slaves of them in 1492. The truth, as numerous scholars have shown, is that Indians and other oppressed Americans could sometimes be the masters not only of their own destiny but of their masters’ destiny as well. To cite only the most remarkable of these arguments, Sally Wagner showed that in the middle of the nineteenth century, when white Americans’ racism against Indians was at its height, some whites—feminists—saw some Indians— Iroquois wives—as role models, since they had the right to own property, get divorced, and, if they did divorce, keep custody of their kids. They even played an important political role, which helped inspire Elizabeth Cady Stanton to make the most outrageous of the demands in the declaration she drew up in Seneca Falls: for the right to vote. And now Scott Pratt has set himself the even tougher task of tracing the impact of Indian ideas across several generations. Pratt’s mission reminded me in some ways of Lewis and Clark’s search for a route to Oregon, where Pratt makes his home today. As they left St. Louis in May 1804, Lewis and Clark knew the first thing they had to do was to find the source of the Missouri River, the arm of the river that would take them furthest west. As we all know, one reason they succeeded was that they acquired an Indian guide, Sacajawea. In Native Pragmatism, Scott Pratt seeks the source of American Pragmatism, and he proposes that we will never find it unless we, too, become willing to hire Indian guides. I have to preface my analysis of the book by confessing to you just how little I know
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Pub Date : 2003-07-01DOI: 10.1080/1090377042000285426
Ralph R. Acampora
Semi-urban ecotones exist on the periphery and in the midst of many human population centers. This article addresses the need for and nature of an ethos appropriate to inter-species contact in such zones. It first examines the historical and contemporary intellectual resources available for developing this kind of ethic, then surveys the range of possible relationships between humans and other animals, and finally investigates the morality of multi-species neighborhoods as a promising model. Discussion of these themes has the effect, in conclusion, of dismantling notorious dualisms traditionally associated with the geographic imagination (city/wild, human/animal, nature/culture).
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Pub Date : 2003-02-01DOI: 10.1080/1090377032000063360
J. Meyer
Political Nature stands at the very important juncture of politics and environmentalism, and in it John M. Meyer challenges political thought that would divorce politics from questions of the human-nature relation, as well as environmentalist thought that would divorce questions about the human-nature relation from politics. Meyer thus brings the political and the environmental together in an attempt to move past some familiar environmentalist debates and towards a more productive environmentalism. The book is divided into three sections, the first of which reviews and critiques certain strains of environmentalist literature. Meyer’s analysis begins by noting that environmentalists often emphasize the importance of developing a new worldview or “ecological conception of nature” (5)—a conception often linked to ecological science— which asserts “that humans and non-human nature are necessarily connected and hence interdependent” (35). This view, Meyer argues, is intended by environmentalists to give new direction to our dealings with the natural world and to inform greener social and political practices, but Meyer is concerned that within this way of thinking “political debate becomes ... largely inconsequential” (33) due to the fact that it sees politics as “a mere consequence of our worldview” (37). He goes on to suggest that this emphasis on worldviews is supported by two dominant ways in which environmentalists (and others) read the history of Western thought. The “dualist” reading (35 ff.), which Meyer finds in clear form in the work of ecofeminist Val Plumwood, contends that in the West our thinking about human beings and human activities involves a rejection of our status as natural beings. Interpreting Western thought in this way, it is easy to see the power of a transformed worldview: if our current practices are premised upon such a dualism, then the ecological worldview “can have great power to restructure our thinking on a wide variety of other subjects; most notably on politics and social order” (40). The second reading, which Meyer associates with Carolyn Merchant and Freya Mathews, is that political and social orders have in fact been derived from conceptions of nature all along. On this “derivative” account (36 ff.), the problem in the West is not that our thinking about politics has been based on a dualistic separation of the human from the natural, but rather that the current (mechanistic) conception of nature gives rise to a distinctively un-ecological order of things. Consequently, on this telling, the ecological worldview is promoted as a corrective to previous, flawed understandings of nature and the practices to which they have given rise. Meyer takes issue with both of these interpretations, not least because of their oversimplification of the nature-politics relation in Western thought. This critique is
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Pub Date : 2003-02-01DOI: 10.1080/1090377032000063315
C. Palmer
Urbanization and development of green spaces is continuing worldwide. Such development frequently engulfs the habitats of native animals, with a variety of effects on their existence, location and ways of living. This paper attempts to theorize about some of these effects, drawing on aspects of Foucault's discussions of power and using a metaphor of human colonization, where colonization is understood as an "ongoing process of dispossession, negotiation, transformation, and resistance." It argues that a variety of different kinds of human/animal power relations can exist in urban areas, not all of which are examples of human domination. The paper concludes by raising a number of questions about the implications of these human/animal relations.
{"title":"Colonization, urbanization, and animals","authors":"C. Palmer","doi":"10.1080/1090377032000063315","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1090377032000063315","url":null,"abstract":"Urbanization and development of green spaces is continuing worldwide. Such development frequently engulfs the habitats of native animals, with a variety of effects on their existence, location and ways of living. This paper attempts to theorize about some of these effects, drawing on aspects of Foucault's discussions of power and using a metaphor of human colonization, where colonization is understood as an \"ongoing process of dispossession, negotiation, transformation, and resistance.\" It argues that a variety of different kinds of human/animal power relations can exist in urban areas, not all of which are examples of human domination. The paper concludes by raising a number of questions about the implications of these human/animal relations.","PeriodicalId":431617,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy & Geography","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122890505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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