In Walden Henry David Thoreau argues for and against patriotism. This paper argues that thoughtful environmentalists should do likewise. It explicates Thoreau’s accounts of “settling” and farming as efforts to rethink and deepen his connections to the land. These efforts define a patriotism that is local, thoughtful and moral. Thoreau’s economic philosophy can be seen as applied patriotism. Likeother virtues such as courage or prudence, patriotism is liable to a skewed development and various kinds of misuse. Yet properly developed it is a part of a good human life. Thoreauvian patriotism provides a strong base from which to oppose militarism and xenophobia, which many intellectuals mistakenly equate with patriotism.

In this brief comment on Ted Schoen’s paper, I tend to agree more than I disagree. Methodological isolation has been widely and uncritically accepted by thinkers about religion and science, and Schoen’s dissipation of the isolationist discourse deserves positive notice. For too long, science has been the bully of the epistemic neighborhood, and religious thinkers have taken refuge in methodological isolation. As Schoen argues, neither religion nor science is isolated; rather, both are interacting in the same comprehensive and value-laden domain, which also includes art, poetry, ethics and metaphysics.

William Lane Craig has defended a modern First Cause argument based on 1) a principle of universal causality and 2) the claim that the universe must have had a beginning. But 1) is susceptible to counter examples from quantum theory. Moreover, Craig’s defense of 2) is open to serious question. He claims that an actual infinity (of time) is impossible; he also claims that 2) is in fact supported by big bang theory. I argue that both of these claims are mistaken, and that in consequence we have no particular reason to suppose that 2) is true. I conclude that the First Cause argument fails, but I suggest that a weaker inductive argument might be worth a try.

Does Leopold’s land ethic principle represent a break with traditional We stern moral philosophies as some have argued? Or is it instead an extension of traditional Western moral ideas as Leopold believed? I argue that Leopold’s principle is compatible with an ecologically-informed Kantianism

Self-understanding is to a great extent defined by narrative: who we are as human beings is determined by the stories we, and others, tell about ourselves. Yet many are unable to compose coherent personal narratives, as their experiences do not fall within the scope of an accepted conceptual framework. Survivors of trauma are particularly apt to fall into this “narrative rift,” where there can be no words to describe, and hence can be no assimilation of, their experiences. Using the example of child sexual abuse, and drawing on the work of Bass, Spence, Schafer, and Guignon, I propose an examination of the nature of narrative fragmentation itself. Philosophical counselling may succeed where psychoanalysis might not: for where the latter has theoretical commitments to specific narratives, the former, through its reluctance to force epistemological or metaphysical assumptions on the narrator, may well facilitate a more comprehensive self-understanding.