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Publications in Philosophy & Theology by NOMIS researchers

The Work that Work does: How intrinsic and instrumental values are transformed into relational values through active work participation in Swiss community supported agriculture

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

August 31, 2023

Community supported agriculture (CSA) is an alternative food network that aims to enable sustainable and just food production by bringing consumers and producers together. One version of CSA (Solidarische Landwirtschaft in German or Solidarity Agriculture) requires active labour participation of members as part of the subscription price. This paper uses a relational values approach to explore what motivates members to join and participate in solidarity agriculture cooperatives and how the experience of participation changes their values and behaviour. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 21 members of three co-operatives and analysed using a grounded theory approach. Specifically, we applied the Syntax of Environmental Values Framework, developed by Deplazes-Zemp and Chapman. Results show that members typically hold strong intrinsic values regarding fair compensation for farmer’s work and local environmental sustainability and instrumental values regarding food quality and healthy eating. We found that participation and work practices at the cooperative added to and changed values and behaviour through new relational connections to food, farmers and to nature via the agricultural landscape. These findings provide new insight into the ways that relational values can be adopted and more broadly on the relationship between values and behaviour. This paper concludes that values, especially relational values, can form and change through lived experiences. Our results can help guide programs aiming to foster pro-environmental values in a local population by highlighting one possible mechanism to do so. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. © 2023 The Authors. People and Nature published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society.

Research field(s)
Arts & Humanities, Philosophy & Theology, Philosophy

DOI
10.1002/pan3.10531

Beyond Intrinsic and Instrumental: Third-Category Value in Environmental Ethics and Environmental Policy

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

January 24, 2023

Values have always tended to play a central role in discourse on the environment, a tendency which is currently particularly evident in the biodiversity context. Traditionally, arguments about the environment have invoked instrumental value to highlight the necessity or utility of a healthy environment for people and intrinsic value to emphasize the importance of protecting nature for its own sake. More recently, this value dichotomy has been challenged, and the notion of a third value category – relational value – has been introduced into the political and social conservation discussion. In the field of environmental philosophy, the idea of a third category of environmental value already has a longer tradition. This article describes and compares several philosophical accounts of third-category environmental value to contribute to a better characterization of relational value and thus to a better understanding of the role this type of value can play in environmental discourse and policy.

Research field(s)
Philosophy

DOI
10.1080/21550085.2023.2166341

Are People Part of Nature? Yes and No: A Perspectival Account of the Concept of ‘Nature’

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

June 1, 2022

The question of whether or not people are part of nature is relevant to discuss humans’ role on earth and their environmental responsibilities. This article introduces the perspectival account of the concept of ‘nature,’ which starts from the observation that we talk about the environment from a particular, human perspective. In this account, the term ‘nature’ is used to refer to those parts of and events in the environment we perceive as not being shaped by typically human activities. Humans themselves are part of nature insofar as they participate in and are products of natural processes. Therefore, in this account, nature is not only the passive environment, but also something active and generative that does not operate through human creativity, but rather alongside and together with it in shaping our environment. According to the perspectival account, the ‘nature’ concept expresses a particular relationship between the human agent and the non-human environment, which can be the starting point for normative theory.

Research field(s)
Arts & Humanities, Philosophy & Theology, Applied Ethics

DOI
10.5840/enviroethics202242736

Otherness-based Reasons for the Protection of (Bio)Diversity

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

June 1, 2022

Different arguments in favor of the moral relevance of the concept of biodiversity (e.g., in terms of its intrinsic or instrumental value) face a range of serious difficulties, despite that biodiversity constitutes a central tenet of many environmentalist practices and beliefs. That discrepancy is considerable for the debate on potential moral reasons for protecting biodiversity. This paper adds a new angle by focusing on the potential of the concept of natural otherness-specifically individual and process otherness in nature-for providing additional moral reasons in favor of the protection of biodiversity as variety. Four arguments are presented. Two arguments draw on the individual natural otherness of nonhuman living beings and two additional arguments draw on the process otherness of active nature. The upshot is that each of these arguments-if successful-provides a moral reason in favor of the protection of biodiversity.

Research field(s)
Arts & Humanities, Philosophy & Theology, Applied Ethics

DOI
10.5840/enviroethics202271341

Visual attention in pictorial perception

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

December 1, 2021

According to the received view in the philosophical literature on pictorial perception, when perceiving an object in a picture, we perceive both the picture’s surface and the depicted object, but the surface is only unconsciously represented. Furthermore, it is suggested, such unconscious representation does not need attention. This poses a crucial problem, as empirical research on visual attention shows that there can hardly be any visual representation, conscious or unconscious, without attention. Secondly, according to such a received view, when looking at a picture aesthetically, one both consciously represents and visually attends to both the depicted object and the picture’s surface simultaneously. Thus, contra the empirical research on attention, only conscious visual representations are coupled, by such current view, with attention. And this clearly poses a second problem, as this philosophical account is not in tune with what vision science tells us about the functioning of our visual system. Furthermore, this raises another crucial problem, namely, that of explaining why aesthetic experience of pictures does not feel odd or conflicting, since, as previously noted in the philosophical literature, and contra the received view, if we are simultaneously consciously perceiving both the picture’s surface and the depicted object, there seems to be two things, at the same time, in the foreground of one’s visual consciousness. But, if so, as suggested, this would lead to a conflicting spatial visual experience. This paper offers a new description of the role of visual attention in picture perception, which explains the difference between the usual and the aesthetic way of perceiving a depicted object, without facing the problems reported above. A crucial role in our new account is played by the notion of unconscious attention, the distinction between focal and distributed, as well as top-down and bottom-up visual attention and the relationship between visual attention and visual consciousness. The paper, thus, offers the first theory concerning the exercise of visual attention in pictorial perception that is both philosophically rigorous and empirically reliable.

Research field(s)
Arts & Humanities, Philosophy & Theology, Philosophy

DOI
10.1007/s11229-020-02873-z

Anti-intellectualist motor knowledge

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

November 1, 2021

Intellectualists suggest that practical knowledge, or ‘knowing- how’, can be reduced to propositional knowledge, or ‘knowing-that’. Anti-intellectualists, on the contrary, suggest, following the original insights by Ryle, that such a reduction is not possible. Rejection of intellectualism can be proposed either by offering purely philosophical analytical arguments, or by recruiting empirical evidence from cognitive science about the nature of the mental representations involved in these two forms of knowledge. In this paper, I couple these two strategies in order to analyze some crucial reasons for which intellectualism seems not to be the best theory we have to correctly understand and describe practical knowledge. In particular, I will start from a specific philosophical account against intellectualism offered by Dickie (Philos Phenomenol Res LXXXV(3):737–745, 2012), and suggest that it can be supported by current experimental results coming from motor neuroscience. The claim of the paper is that there is at least one kind of practical knowledge, which I call motor knowledge, and which is at the basis of the performance of skilled action, which cannot be reduced to propositional knowledge.

Research field(s)
Arts & Humanities, Philosophy & Theology, Philosophy

DOI
10.1007/s11229-020-02750-9

The value of listening and listening for values in conservation

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

July 15, 2021

Listening is a pervasive and significant act of conservation research and praxis, mattering greatly for the realisation of conservation agendas, not least its ambitions to be outward looking and inclusive in approach. Yet, the value and role of listening has been barely explored in a sustained and reflexive way. This paper is a preliminary schematic of what it might mean to attend to the act of listening, set within the context of a larger field of listening scholarship as well as more specific manoeuvres to embed relational approaches into the study of people and nature interactions. We explore what it means to ‘listen well’ within the context of conservation, highlighting the importance of recognising listening as a relationship and our positions and power within those relationships; the need to care for the relationship through respect and empathy; and the building of inclusive relationships of listening by attending to how space and time influences understanding. We offer examples of how researchers and practitioners can create spaces for listening, illustrating our discussion with personal reflections about listening practices gained through our various conservation and research careers. We provide approaches and ideas which help the reader—academic and practitioner—to both understand and articulate the value of listening in conservation and relational values of nature. We hope to inspire the wider use of listening-based approaches in conservation research and practice, and the recognition and support from senior managers and funders of what is needed to promote long-term and meaningful relationships between people and nature. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. © 2021 The Authors. People and Nature published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society.

Research field(s)
Arts & Humanities, Philosophy & Theology, Philosophy

DOI
10.1002/pan3.10232

How Knowing-That and Knowing-How Interface in Action: The Intelligence of Motor Representations

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

July 12, 2021

What mental states are required for an agent to know-how to perform an action? This question fuels one of the hottest debates in the current literature on philosophy of action. Answering this question means facing what we call here The Challenge of Format Dualism, which consists in establishing which is the format of the mental representations involved in practical knowledge and, in case they are given in more than one format, explaining how these different formats can interlock. This challenge has generated two parallel debates: the debate between Intellectualism and Anti-Intellectualism on the one hand, and the debate on the Interface Problem on the other. While the former is about whether practical knowledge can be considered a species of propositional knowledge, the latter investigates how motoric and propositional states can be related. Here we offer a unified account capable of explicitly analyzing those two problems within the same philosophical framework. Our account suggests a new way for solving the Interface Problem that paves the way for addressing the debate between Intellectualism and Anti-Intellectualism. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

Research field(s)
Arts & Humanities, Philosophy & Theology, Philosophy

DOI
10.1007/s10670-021-00395-9

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