Highlights and Connections

Summary

Given this chance to express my general reflections on our collection of papers, I shall highlight the themes that are of greatest importance to me and make connections between my own views and the views of the other authors (about half the total) who have chosen to address the same themes. This exercise in triangulation on the logical map created by the collection has been illuminating for me; I hope the following may serve to make some of the major features of our common terrain come into focus more clearly, thus underscoring which important issues concern many of us at present, despite our specific differences.

From such a vantage point I realize that my principal paper, defending Personalistic Organicism, is at heart a plea for environmental philosophers to get beyond modes of premature binary thinking that have long obsessed (and paralysed) modern thought. ‘All-or-nothing’, ‘either-or’, ‘on-off’ reflexes are ubiquitous and strong, going back at least to Descartes, but equally strongly expressed in Kant and the British Empiricists as well. Of course disjunction is finally necessary if our concepts are going to mean something rather than something else. I am not calling for the overthrow of the Law of Excluded Middle.