The blame for the environmental disaster that threatens to overtake us unless something is done to avert it is often laid at the door of the Bible and the tradition that comes out of it. Typical of this trend is Lynn White's landmark essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967), which traces the West's ruthless exploitation of nature to the biblical injunction that human beings are to “subdue” the earth and exercise “dominion” over all other living things. Ironically, White's indictment all but coincided with the triumph of an older theory the object of which was to demonstrate against the Enlightenment that, far from being hostile to modern science, the glory of our civilization and the instrument of its conquest of nature, the Christian tradition was the principal agent of its emergence. Christianity would thus be simultaneously and for the same reason responsible for what is best and what is worst in the modern world. The article challenges the premise that these two theories share, namely, that modern science is a child of premodern Christian thought. It begins with a restatement of what was once the commonly accepted view of our relationship to nonhuman nature and ends with a brief account of the essential limitations of modern natural science.

Reprising an ancient strand of philosophical reasoning, contemporary environmental theorists often argue as if nature (the land, ecosystems) were a repository of value in itself, establishing guidelines for human conduct in moral and political matters. John Stuart Mill supposedly discredited such reasoning in his 1854 essay, “Nature.” But modern intrinsic-value-in-nature theories differ from those that Mill attacked, as a careful reading of Leopold's A Sand County Almanac reveals. Leopold, whose thought provides the inspiration for most of the intrinsic-value-in-nature theorizing within environmental philosophy today, tacitly rejects the modernist, physics-derived view of nature as a realm of timeless, abstract laws. He replaces it with a view of the land and its creatures as historically concrete, unique totalities that can almost be read as “texts,” and thus may inspire respect and love (rather than detached theorizing alone) on the part of the ecologically-aware person. The key virtue for Leopold is “perception,” a blend of training, hermeneutic skill, and identification with the natural world.

Feminist critics of Locke perceive a conflict between his promise of political liberty and equality and women's individual and social circumstances. Many feminists point to an incongruence in Locke's thought between formal political rights and the substantive inequalities women experience in a variety of social relationships. Emphasizing Locke's liberal distinction between private and public, these feminists explore how women's actual personal, marital, familial and economic (i.e., private) positions mitigate against the possibility of political emancipation for women. Opposing this interpretation, this article will argue that Locke's feminist critics misread Locke and misinterpret his distinction between private and public. What some feminists represent as a dichotomy between public and private is actually for Locke a multitude of interacting spheres in which individuals live. An examination of these spheres will reveal a latent potential in Locke's philosophy for addressing women's particular circumstances.

Democracies do not fight one another. This is because they are self-organizing systems and therefore fundamentally distinct from other states. As systems, liberal democracies have more in common with science and the market than they do with undemocratic states. By contrast, undemocratic states are best conceived as instrumental organizations pursuing relatively well defined goals. Liberal democracies do not normally pursue particular goals, are rarely comprehensible as rational actors, have unusually open boundaries, are self-transforming, and handle greater complexity than instrumental organizations. These characteristics provide the foundation for their mutually pacific relationships. The U.S. president's partial insulation from these characteristics explains why the United States has sometimes undermined small quasi-democratic states. This analysis sheds light on how norms and institutions help maintain the democratic peace.

When citizens elect leaders whose policies conflict with standing international agreements, which claim deserves more respect, the treaty or the will of the majority? International law and democratic theory both point to constitutionalism as a way to address this dilemma. An examination of the effects of the elections of John F. Kennedy in 1961 and Willy Brandt in 1969 on U.S.-F.R.G. alliance commitments shows that the dilemma is not resolvable in principle, but that constitutional democracies adopt a variety of practices including consultation, public diplomacy, and commitment reinterpretation to make the tension between the two principles manageable.