Exploring New and Renewed Eco‐Spiritualities

This essay discusses five recent books, written in French, that contribute to refection in environmental ethics. Francophone literature on the topic is marked by resonant and divergent concerns, and rooted in a geography, politics, and history different from North America and marked by distinctive lines of intellectual influence. Jean‐Claude Eslin proposes recovering ecological resources from the Christian tradition and also suggests imagining new images of God: notably, God as pilote rather than artisan. Dominique Bourg takes a multi‐disciplinary approach that emphasizes the spiritual conditions for relating to the world ecologically and economically; he argues for sobriété (austerity) as a spiritual disposition and an economic model. Baptiste Morizot develops diplomacy as an ethical, political, and spiritual model for cohabiting with wolves, whose return to the French countryside has been highly controversial. Nastassja Martin offers an anthropological study of the indigenous Gwich’in community of Fort Yukon, Alaska that accentuates the mix of Protestant missional influences and Gwich’in spiritual affirmations and practices at play in their relationship to the nonhuman world. Attending to this literature may helpfully decenter anglophone debates and enrich their conceptual vocabulary.     

Forward inference in risky choice: Mapping gaze and decision processes

The study of cognitive processes is built on a close mapping between three components: overt gaze behavior, overt choice, and covert processes. To validate this overt–covert mapping in the domain of decision‐making, we collected eye‐movement data during decisions between risky gamble problems. Applying a forward inference paradigm, participants were instructed to use specific decision strategies to solve those gamble problems (maximizing expected values or applying different choice heuristics) during which gaze behavior was recorded. We revealed differences between overt behavior, as indicated by eye movements, and covert decision processes, instructed by the experimenter. However, our results show that the overt–covert mapping is for some eye‐movement measures not as close as expected by current decision theory, and hence question reverse inference as being prone to fallacies due to a violation of its prerequisite, that is, a close overt–covert mapping. We propose a framework to rehabilitate reverse inference.     

A faith for all seasons

A FAITH FOR ALL SEASONS:ISLAM AND WESTERN MODERNITY. By Shabbir Akhtar. London: Bellew Publishing, 1990. 251pp. Hb. £25.00. ISBN 0–947792–41–4.     

Civic religion in England: Traditions and transformations

As the religious diversity of English towns and cities has grown over the past thirty years due to the establishment in some places of sizeable communities of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, as well as other faiths, there have been important changes to local public religion. Traditional civic ceremonies, such as Remembrance Sunday, as well as new forms of civic celebration and commemoration, are now increasingly taking account of the diversity of faiths represented in Britain. This paper examines the consequences of religious diversity for English civic religion by looking at some of the traditions of civic ceremonies in England and at the way in which they have been transformed by the changing religious landscape of towns and cities. The paper also explores some of the dilemmas and questions that have emerged both for the Church of England as well as for the other faith communities when it comes to the design and delivery of civic ceremonies.     

Objectivism about Color and Comparative Color Statements. Reply to Hansen*

Nat Hansen builds a new argument for subjectivism about the semantics of color language, based on a potential kind of intersubjective disagreements about comparative color statements. In reply, I note that the disagreements of this kind are merely hypothetical, probably few if actual, and not evidently relevant as test cases for a semantic theory. Furthermore, even if they turned out to be actual and semantically relevant, they would be intuitively unusable by the subjectivist.