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208 Book Reviews John Dewey and Environmental Philosophy Hugh P. McDonald Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004 xix + 227 pp. Potential readers may respond to the tide of McDonald's book in one of several ways, depending on their familiarity with Dewey and with environmental philosophy. First, those who are well-versed in Dewey's work but not in the environmental philosophy literature will likely discern the evident connection and regard "John Dewey and Environmental Philosophy" as a moderately interesting and probably important topic. Those who know the environmental literature will recognize this as a substantive contribution to "environmental pragmatism," even if they know little about pragmatism or Dewey. Third are those (hopefully very few) who would dismiss McDonald's topic as eccentric, idiosyncratic, or dispensable — on a par, say, with a monograph on "Nicholas Malebranche and Bicycle Racing." Finally, there are those who know enough about Dewey and about environmental philosophy to recognize a plain fact, which can be stated here for the benefit of the other three groups of potential readers: everyone interested in environmental philosophy has for at least the past twenty years sorely needed a careful study of Dewey as a green thinker. McDonald discusses the philosophical reasons for this at some length in his book; an account of the historical reasons behind this statement may help drive the point home. Though there are too many important precursors to contemporary environmental philosophy to mention here, one might mark its debut as a distinctive academic discipline with a University of Georgia philosophy conference on environmental crisis held in 1972. Early work in this area was decisively influenced by questions and proposals outlined in two 1973 papers: Richard Roudey's "Is there a Need for a New, an Environmental Ethic?" and Arne Naess's "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement." Peter Singer added another dimension to the nascent field with Animal Liberation, a work whose genesis lay in a 1973 New York Review of Boo fa article. Numerous philosophers, mostiy from Europe, Australia and North America, responded to the challenges raised in these pioneer works. As philosophers reworked their intellectual tools and made them available for use in complex public debates about environmental issues, schisms began to appear among the various groups of scholars engaged in this work. Before long three main camps had emerged within environmental philosophy. These groupings proved key to the subsequent development of academic discourse about the environment: the philosophical, largely theory-oriented environmental ethicists found themselves at odds with the political and spiritual commitments of many deep ecofogists, and both of these groups were at odds with the animal Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Winter, 2005, Vol. XLI, No. 1 Book Reviews 209 liberationists' insistence on the primary value of individual organisms. In short, what could have been a global collaboration to articulate the principles of environmental philosophy had splintered almost before it became a recognizable development. By the 1980's, many within the environmental ethics camp had come to regard a few principles as central to any proposed theory of environmental ethics. A legitimate environmental ethic, on this view, should assert a holistic and nonanthropocentric notion of the basis of value, based on recognition of the intrinsic value of features of the non-human world. The avowed goal was to articulate a monistic theory reducible to a single set of self-consistent fundamental principles, rather than a pluralistic methodology drawing from various principles chosen according to their suitability for the problem at hand. This program for developing an environmental ethic generated a great deal of literature. The debate seemed to some observers, however, to have become repetitive, obsessed with merely semantic distinctions, and dominated by a small group of principal writers. In particular, a proper attitude toward the terms "intrinsic value" and "anthropocentrism" came to be regarded as essential to valid discourse about environmental ethics. Much of the literature consisted of more or less unsuccessful attempts to define these terms and their relatives; much of the remainder created further confusion by using these terms as if their meaning was self-evident and unambiguous. To read through the environmental ethics literature of the 1980's was...

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