| 书目名称 | Paul B. Thompson‘s Philosophy of Agriculture | | 副标题 | Fields, Farmers, For | | 编辑 | Samantha Noll,Zachary Piso | | 视频video | | | 概述 | The first book dedicated to the work of Paul B. Thompson by scholars from the United States, Europe, and Asia.Integrates questions about the ethics and sustainability of farming with work on food and | | 丛书名称 | The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics | | 图书封面 |  | | 描述 | .This book explores the philosophical thought and praxis of Paul B. Thompson, who planted some of the first seeds of philosophy of agriculture and whose work inspires interdisciplinary scholarship in food ethics, biotechnology, and environmental philosophy. Landmark texts such as The Spirit of the Soil, The Agrarian Vision, and From Field to Fork revealed the fertility of food systems for inspiring reflection on our relationships to technology, the land, and one another. Rooted in philosophical traditions ranging from pragmatism to post-phenomenology, Thompson’s work nourishes projects in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of science, and social and political theory, not only in academic philosophy departments but also in the social and natural sciences. This volume collects this diversity of thought in a tour of the many fields of food systems; from theorizing the sustainability of agroecological systems, to appreciating the quotidian practice of agrarian communities, to anticipating the impacts of emerging biotechnology, and to savoring the roles that food plays in forming our identities. Composed by an international crop of scholars working on the future of food ethics, the volu | | 出版日期 | Book 2023 | | 关键词 | Paul B; Thompson; Philosophy of Agriculture; Philosophy of Food; Philosophy of Technology; American Phil | | 版次 | 1 | | doi | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37484-5 | | isbn_softcover | 978-3-031-37486-9 | | isbn_ebook | 978-3-031-37484-5Series ISSN 1570-3010 Series E-ISSN 2215-1737 | | issn_series | 1570-3010 | | copyright | The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerl |
| 1 |
,Thompson’s Pluralist Philosophy: Fields, Farmers, Food, and Forks, |
Samantha Noll,Zachary Piso |
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Abstract
This chapter is an introduction to the volume on the legacy of Paul B. Thompson. It also provides an overview of each of the chapters in this volume, exploring how they critically engage with Thompson’s work. This is important for understanding his legacy, as each highlights how Thompson’s research impacts current and future work on some of the most pressing issues of our age—such as sustainability, food security, biotechnology, and the impacts of agricultural practices. Thompson made significant contributions to philosophical inquiry in his areas of expertise, including philosophy of agriculture, environmental ethics, and American philosophy. Food and farming are research topics of marked complexity. His expansive research portfolio carves out a unique space in the discipline, as it acts as a bridge between philosophical subfields and beyond, engaging deeply with a surprising range of scientific disciplines. Thompson’s methods are at once sensitive to complexity, scale, psychology, emotion, science, justice, theory, and culture.
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| 2 |
,Pragmatism, Problem Solving, and Strategies for Engaged Philosophy, |
Evelyn Brister |
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Abstract
Philosophical pragmatism provides a theory and practical guidance for engaged philosophy. The movement to apply philosophy to real-world problems gained traction in the 1970s and has become an important area of philosophical inquiry. Applied philosophy draws connections between philosophical principles and real-life problems. This has been a valuable methodology for many purposes, and it especially serves the purposes of philosophers. Unfortunately, it often starts from existing frameworks or principles that are recognized by philosophers but does not start from real-life problems as they are experienced by people. Indeed, sometimes people observe miscommunication and disconnections but are not clear what the source of the problem is. Identifying the nature of a social problem from the perspective of the people who deal with it is a large part of what is required to then analyze the problem philosophically. This requires communicating directly with practitioners, policymakers, and researchers in the field at issue. Paul Thompson’s engaged philosophical approach to agricultural ethics demonstrates the diversity of philosophical activities that are required to accomplish this goal, and it is rooted in pragmatism. Engaged philosophy is more expansive than applied philosophy because it serves many functions and the frameworks produced are emergent rather than prescribed. Engaged philosophy offers an implicit critique of contemporary norms of applied philosophical practice, and it opens up creative opportunities for philosophers to engage in real-life problem solving. This essay traces Paul Thompson’s strategies for engaged philosophy and their relation to pragmatism.
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| 3 |
,Through Forks to Fields: Backcasting Workshops in Japan for Designing Sustainable Local Food Systems, |
Kazuhiko Ota,Steven McGreevy,Yoshimitsu Taniguchi,Motoki Akitsu,Hiraku Kumagai,Nahoko Katano |
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Abstract
This chapter introduces case studies of the backcasting workshop for designing sustainable local food systems in Japan and describes each stage of the co-design process for participants referring to the theoretical frameworks raised by Paul B. Thompson. Backcasting is a method used by participants to envision a sustainable society, support decision making, and promote action. However, there has not been sufficient analysis of case studies on balancing the enthusiasm to actively intervene in society with the prudence that the activity may have unanticipated adverse consequences. Therefore, this chapter analyzes which processes of backcasting triggered participants to focus on the “wicked problem” nature of the issue of sustainable food systems. With feedback from participants of backcasting workshops, we can find four opportunities in this workshop process to encourage our active intervention in local food systems and to make us aware of our potential imperfections: (1) different picture of the ideal food scenario by people living in the same community, (2) common requisites that will become a foothold for collaboration, (3) needs for specific knowledge and information for intervention situations, and (4) various factors surrounding the ideal food scenario. Participants’ comments suggested that the structured approach of backcasting not only identifies points of intervention in reality but also provides an opportunity to be aware of the tragedy and irony inherent in the story, which is caused by potential human imperfections.
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| 4 |
,Thompson on Functions of Pragmatism: Adding Food and Agricultural Valuation to the Philosophy of Technology, |
Raymond Anthony |
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Abstract
Paul Thompson’s agrarian pragmatism (Thompson ., .) is a compass of valuation that (i) pays homage to the people (including real farmers), animals, and places that contribute to the food value chain (Thompson ., .), (ii) explores the mourning, uncertainty, and vulnerability that accompany loss of focal practices and the agricultural landscapes that give them expression (Thompson ., .), and (iii) inspires discovery of new “platforms” (.) or “social imaginaries” (Berry .) that beckon shifts in our ethics, praxis, culture, and politics that reach beyond technological innovation (Thompson ., ., .) to steward how humans coexist in and shape the natural environment. My discussion of Thompson’s impact on “Food Ethics Futures” draws on the significance of Peirce’s Evolutionary Love (.) as a formula for understanding moral growth and self-transformation. Thompson’s agrarian pragmatism (., .) reflects a vital human agapic formula that contains the blueprint for our growth amidst the dominance of industrial capitalism. Its “good elements of living” (Bailey .), marked by the development of caring and trusting relationships that involve gratitude, humility, solidarity, healing, growth, and moral responsiveness, invite “affection” (Berry .) that inspires lessons on how to strengthen human relationships with the natural world and land-community. The essay ends by raising some lingering anxieties about whether agrarian pragmatism is up to the task and the resources from without agrarian pragmatism that are necessary to advance agapic love.
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| 5 |
,What Do We Mean by ‘Industrial Agriculture’? The Example of the Irish Dairy Sector, |
Orla Shortall |
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Abstract
The term ‘industrial’ agriculture is often used in academia, the media, and by campaigning groups to denote a type of agriculture that is undesirable. The term is often not defined, but has connotations of environmental damage, poor animal welfare and working conditions, corporate control and homogenous, soulless food. This paper explores the ambiguity of the term ‘industrial’ agriculture and asks why and in what context the term has use as an analytic concept, through the examples of pasture-based dairy sector in Ireland. The Irish dairy sector markets itself as the antithesis of industrial agriculture: small, family farms producing seasonal milk from grass, which is bought and sold by farmer cooperatives. This system is often contrasted with indoor dairy farming where cows do not graze which is framed by some campaigners and academics as polluting, cruel to animals, and disenfranchising for farmer. The situation is more complicated on closer analysis as the Irish dairy industry has undergone rapid and environmentally damaging expansion in recent years, within a pasture-based, family farm paradigm, which has threatened its public licence. The paper argues that when using the term ‘industrial agriculture’ and similar terms as an analytic concept, it is useful to focus on the values and governance regime underpinning a particular farm system as well as the physical infrastructure of the farming system, i.e., what the farm looks like. This builds on Paul Thompson’s work analyzing the philosophy and values underpinning developments within agriculture.
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| 6 |
,Western Livestock Production and Their Challenge to Thompson’s Food System Archetypes, |
Jared L Talley |
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Abstract
Food systems are complex and made especially so by the competing values that diverse communities attribute to them and expect from them. The four archetypes of food systems that Paul B. Thompson has conceptualized help to provide clarity to this complexity; however, the food system of livestock production in the American West does not neatly align with any of these. In this chapter, I briefly describe the archetypes and how they each align and misalign with my experiences in this food system. My readers can expect to learn a bit about the history of grazing in the West, federally managed lands, current livestock practices in the West, and how the intertwining of the three create a food system that challenges the four archetypes. Ultimately, I aim to illustrate that Western livestock production systems do not fit neatly into Thompson’s archetypes, leading to either refining the archetypes or the emergence of a fifth archetype that shares features with (but is not reducible to) the others.
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| 7 |
,The Promise in Disasters: Reducing Epistemic Deficits of Food Systems for Sustainability, |
Ian Werkheiser |
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Abstract
As Paul Thompson has argued, agriculture, and food systems more generally, can be usefully analyzed with tools from the philosophy of technology. Don Ihde’s framework of multistability of possible relationships with technology suggests Thompson is right when he argues for the possibility of societies reforming their food systems to be more sustainable, participatory, and just through a focus on agrarian ideals. Ihde’s framework also suggests that for those of us who interact with food systems as consumers, these technologies are in a “background relationship” with us, in which the technologies of food systems are ignored if they are functioning properly. This background relationship can thus create epistemic deficits which pose a serious impediment to sustainability reforms. I examine this impediment and the opportunities in the disturbance of a system to reduce communities’ and individuals’ epistemic deficit. One recent example of disturbance to the food system this paper will examine is the COVID-19 pandemic. No one would wish for exogenous disruptions like the pandemic, and positive change coming out of them is not inevitable, but this paper will suggest that it is at least possible that we can emerge from disturbance with the resources to make our food systems better.
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| 8 |
,What Philosophers Can Learn from Agrotechnology: Agricultural Metaphysics, Sustainable Egg Production Standards as Ontologies, and Why and How Canola Exists, |
Catherine Kendig |
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Abstract
Agriculture is defined normatively and, as such, is an area of research and practice where values are an inextricable constituent of research, where facts and values elide, and normative constraints generate new ethical categories. While discussions of normativity are part and parcel within agricultural ethics and play a prominent role in ethical discussions, I suggest that other areas of agricultural philosophy such as agricultural metaphysics or ontologies present valuable case studies for philosophical discussion. A series of case studies focusing on how products are classified, graded, and measured illustrate conceptions of existence, causal relationships, and practice-oriented notions of category-making distinctive of agricultural practice. The first of these case studies shines a light on the process of knowledge integration in agriculture. I show how innovative integration, a process discussed within socially sustainable egg production, is an ineliminably normative process. The second case study, and the main focus of the chapter, concerns the normative role of agricultural standards. I discuss how standards and classes in use within egg production systems and the development and measuring techniques make AA eggs and transformed a highly toxic oilseed rape (used as a machine lubricant) into the non-toxic food-grade agricultural commodity, canola. I contend agricultural products like eggs, peanut butter, and canola oil are constituted by prescribed standards (like AA eggs and double-zero canola) that define not only the product, but also the activities related to its production and the practices that producers perform. Because standards and standardization define the categories of not only agricultural products but also agricultural practices, I suggest standards and standardization are best understood as “ontologizing activities.”
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| 9 |
,Food, Focal Practices, and Decolonial Agrarianism, |
Lee A. McBride III |
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Abstract
Agrarianism, according to Paul B. Thompson, is an environmental philosophy focused on agriculture and the nurturing of food, fuel, and fiber. Agrarianism hopes to re-establish our fundamental connection to the land, helping us approach a tenable understanding of sustainability. Thompson enlists Albert Borgmann’s notion of “focal practices” to discuss farming and the culture of the table. With this comes a critique of “the device paradigm,” the modern technological way of life that alienates us from quotidian beauty, lifecycles and seasonality, and vital place-based insights embedded in focal practices and obscures how techno-industrial capitalism limits our opportunities for rich, intimate experiences with our biotic communities. In this paper, the author will outline the contours of Thompson’s agrarian philosophy in light of Borgmann’s focal practices, noting the enduring wisdom in this position. But the author will evoke Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the hegemonic techno-industrial order of things to conjure alternative conceptions of decolonial agrarian futures (that will not foreground bucolic settler-colonial farms).
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| 10 |
,The Opposition to Animal Enhancement, |
Bernice Bovenkerk |
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Abstract
In 2008, Paul Thompson published the seminal article ‘The opposite of human enhancement: Nanotechnology and the blind chicken problem,’ kick-starting a lively debate among animal ethicists. In this article, Thompson argued that disenhancing animals in order to counter welfare problems resulting from livestock farming poses a moral dilemma: While disenhancement could improve the plight of animals, at the same time it raises the strong intuition that it is unethical. One of the underlying disagreements in the debate that ensued appears to be about the question of whether we should think about animal disenhancement from the standpoint of ideal or non-ideal ethical theory. According to Thompson (in The vanishing ethics of husbandry. In Bovenkerk B, Keulartz J (eds) Animals in our midst: the challenges of co-existing with animals in the Anthropocene. Springer, pp 203–221, 2021) and others, realistically, intensive livestock production and associated production diseases will remain for the foreseeable future and disenhancing animals can alleviate a great deal of suffering. Ideal theorists, on the other hand, tend to think there is something wrong with (intensive) animal husbandry in principle and discussing how to make marginal welfare improvements is not addressing the underlying problem. In this contribution, I argue that we need both ideal and non-ideal theory approaches, and I explore a possible objection to animal disenhancement, based on relational theory.
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| 11 |
,Can the Taste of Necessity Be a Taste of Sustainability? an Examination of the American Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), |
Wesley Dean |
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Abstract
I examine two ways of thinking about food-related practices through the lens of taste. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept, the taste of necessity, is an internalized classificatory system that prioritizes quantity over quality and substance over form among those constrained by limited resources. Sustainable taste is then an internalized classification that generates practices that assure a sustainable food system. Inspired by the work of Paul B. Thompson on the normative foundations of sustainability, I take his perspective on taste and food systems as a bridge to discuss how poverty and food-assistance programs are intrinsic to imagining a form of agricultural sustainability. I argue food and nutrition assistance policies impose moral standards for acceptable food-related practices among program recipients, producing an official taste of necessity. Through measures such as the Thrifty Food Plan, and purchasing restrictions and incentives, the USDA Food and Nutrition Service Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), both shapes food-related practices and generates a market for American agricultural products. These approaches to implementing food and nutrition assistance carry with them distinct imaginaries of the food and nutrition system. The valuations of system elements embedded in these imaginaries provide insight into the compatibilities between these two forms of taste.
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| 12 |
,“I Know I Am, but What Are You?” Paul Thompson on the Ethical Irrelevance of Dietetics, |
Lisa Heldke |
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Abstract
This essay addresses Paul Thompson’s claim (made in two pieces separated by 20 years) that “you are . what you eat”; that is, that dietetics is not an ethical matter. I issue a series of challenges to Thompson’s position, all of which have a common underpinning, namely that his critiques of dietetics sound more like the sort I’d expect from an analytic philosopher than from a pragmatist. They are rooted not only in a tightly drawn (if widely philosophically accepted) definition of ethics, but also in a . tightly drawn definition of diet, a definition that doesn’t take much account of context. That the stream from producer to consumer is continuous argues for not forgetting that eating is one link in a chain of activities—a link that literally cannot exist without those that come before it. Resting on this common underpinning are three specific complaints. The first two address what I take to be his implicit definitions of eating and of personhood, challenging his claims that it is possible in principle to separate self-regarding from other-regarding claims, and that purely self-regarding claims are not ethically relevant. The third pushes back on the matter of whether ethics must concern itself all and only with actions that have an impact on others.
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| 13 |
,Further Thoughts on Food Futures, |
Paul B. Thompson |
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Abstract
Thompson provides commentary and reaction to other chapters in the book. It is organized as sections identified by the names of chapter authors. Thompson responds to chapters advancing new ideas in agriculture by indicating how he understands the authors’ analysis with respect to his own work. Chapters that address more philosophical dimensions of Thompson’s writings are addressed by clarifying the pragmatist orientation of Thompson’s thought. Michel Foucault’s metaethics is used as a basis for explaining pragmatist ethical pluralism.
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发表于 2025-3-21 16:26:06
