Books
"Engrossing, entertaining, and deeply evocative, On Beautiful Days Such as This is a must read for anyone who has wondered how a real philosopher thinks as a real human being." -- Daniel Klein, the New York Times, Sunday Times, and Waterstones nonfiction-book-of-the-month best-selling author of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar; Travels with Epicurus: Meditations from a Greek Island on the Pleasures of Old Age; and Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It: Wisdom of the Great Philosophers on How to Live.
A philosopher-cum-singer-songwriter repairs to a Greek island in order to restore his dilapidated soul. On beautiful days such as this, he muses on our search for those things that make us feel most alive, especially as this applies to the "Big Three" of place, work, and love: finding the place (or places) where we feel most at home in this world; finding the kind of work that matters to us; and finding love that endures. He muses on a great many other matters pertaining to this strange and twisting life too: from songs, philosophy, and the rewards and dangers associated with "the ideas game" to the nuclear and environmental threats to our collective future; from the tricky realms of acclaim, criticism, disillusionment, and inspiration to those of love, loss, and, inevitably, mortality. Along the way, he reflects on his passionate love affair with the English-Greek actress and playwright Marianna Sophoulis; his time spent working in Plato’s Academy; the hard-bitten lessons he has learned in winding his way along the Western Trail; and the tensions we must all learn to negotiate in our lives between surface appearances and underlying realities.
By way of doing justice to these wide-ranging themes he interweaves an equally wide range of forms of written expression too – from narrative prose, lively anecdotes, and thoughtful musings to pithy song lyrics, arresting onstage drama, and "live" philosophical talks – the better to capture more richly the journey that has been, the journey that is to come, and the search we must all make for "what it is that matters most when all is said and done".
"Reading this book was like sitting down with Warwick Fox on a beautiful day somewhere on a Greek island overlooking the sea and having a brilliant conversation about love, life, death, Greece, music and philosophy. This is an intimate, playful, thoughtful and generally a wonderful book." -- Gardar Arneson's comment on the book on Amazon; you'll find some other very kind Amazon reviews of the book here.
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A Theory of General Ethics: Human Relationships, Nature, and the Built Environment (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2006)
"This book is striking in its originality. It aims at a very ambitious goal: the development of an ethical theory that encompasses the domains of human relationships, nonhuman animals, and the rest of nature, including the built environment. Remarkably, it succeeds in achieving this goal." -- Andrew McLaughlin, Professor of Philosophy, Lehman College, City University of New York
"This is a very ambitious, very original attempt to provide ethical principles of human relations with the natural, the social, and the humanly built worlds. It is written in accessible language, forcefully and carefully argued, and makes a serious and very important contribution to philosophy." -- Roger S. Gottlieb, author of A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet's Future
"This book is a knock-out! It is, as the author says, the first of its kind to develop an ethical framework to encompass everything of moral significance in our world. Difficult and complex ideas are explained in an accessible style. This is a truly original work and, I venture to say, will become a classic." -- Alastair Gunn, Department of Philosophy, University of Waikato, New Zealand
"Fox brings forth a great deal of intellectual importance because he provides an entire framework for ethics, greater in scope and comparable in intellectual rigor to such leading schools of thought as utilitarianism and Kantianism … Fox is making a major contribution." -- Anonymous reviewer for another (i.e., non-MIT Press) US University Press
"The idea of a general ethical theory is a powerful one that at first appears beyond the scope of any book, let alone one readable by the intelligent layperson. Yet Fox elegantly and lucidly makes a case for just such a system and explains how it may be practically deployed." -- Michael J. Ostwald, Review of A Theory of General Ethics in Nexus Network Journal 10 (2008): 195-198.
"[O]ne is unavoidably impressed with the remarkable extent to which [Fox] has succeeded in producing a genuinely original and internally consistent ethical theory from square one ... This brief sketch cannot really do justice to a strikingly wide-ranging and novel work, which combines rigorous argument with occasional scholarly bombshells ... What can fairly be said, however, is that amid the signs that environmental philosophy may at last be gaining better acceptance by the academic establishment ... the reception given to this book by mainstream philosophical thinkers and journals will be a telling indicator. If real change truly is in the air then this work will be widely appreciated and discussed - and in this reviewer's judgment, the book deserves nothing less. -- Piers Stephens, Review of A Theory of General Ethics in Organization and Environment, 21 (2008): 488-90.
Work by other authors that draws on the theory of responsive cohesion advanced in A Theory of General Ethics:
Isis Brook, "The Virtues of Gardening", in D. O'Brien, ed., Gardening: Philosophy for Everyone (London: Wiley, 2010), pp. 13-25.Isis Brook, "Ethics of Agricultural Landscapes and Food Production", in Zeunart, J. & Waterman, T. eds, Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 367-379.Isis Brook, "Restoring or Re-storying the Lake District: Applying Responsive Cohesion to a Current Problem Situation", Environmental Values 27 (2018): 427-445.Isis Brook, "Enlivening and Deadening Green and Gray Spaces: An Exploration of Christopher Alexander’s Features of Living Design", Contemporary Aesthetics 22 (2024), available online here.John Brown, "Responsive Cohesion and the Value of Wild Nature", paper presented to the Canadian Society for Aesthetics, June 2008, available online here.H. B. McCullough, Political Ideologies (Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2010).Antony Radford, "Responsive Cohesion as the Foundational Value of Architecture", The Journal of Architecture, 14 (2009): 511-532.Antony Radford, "Urban Design, Ethics, and Responsive Cohesion", Building Research & Information, 38 (2010): 379-389.Antony Radford and Tarkko Oksala, "Responsive Cohesion in the Art and Artfulness of Urban Design: Some Case Studies in Helsinki", Journal of Urban Design, 23 (2018): 298-318.Antony Radford, “The Perception of Craft in a Digital Age”, in T. Oksala, T. Orel, A. Mutanen, M. Friman, J. Lamberg, and M. Hintsa, eds. Craft, Technology and Design (Hämeenlinna: Hämeen ammattikorkeakoulu, 2022), pp. 102-116; book freely available here.Ian Thompson, "Landscape and Environmental Ethics", in P. Howard, I. Thompson, and E. Waterton, eds, The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 207-21Terry Williamson, Antony Radford, Helen Bennetts, Understanding Sustainable Architecture (London: Spon Press, 2003).
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Ethics and the Built Environment (London: Routledge, 2000)
"Hurrah for this book! First because Fox understands that '[I]f its full implications are grasped, environmental ethics represents the most general form of ethics we have. Far from being a minor, "applied ethics" offshoot of the field of inquiry hitherto known simply as ethics, environmental ethics actually represents a vast enlargement of that field of enquiry' (p. 1). Second, because his book is devoted to the neglected branch of environmental ethics that deals with the built environment ... This book is intended to kick start a long overdue debate. Fox concludes by expressing the hope that 'this field of inquiry becomes a vigorous, inspirational and practically fruitful contributor to life in the twenty-first century' (p. 228). I bet it does. If you are an architect, structural engineer, urban planner or are in any other way professionally involved in the built environment, or if you are an environmental ethicist who wants to broaden your vision to include the built environment, buy this book. If you're not, buy it for someone who is." -- Opening and closing sentences of Alastair Gunn's review in Environmental Ethics 26 (2004): 217-20.
"Although a single volume would be unable to eliminate the built environment blind spot from environmental ethics, this collection provides a rich set of ideas from which to begin." -- Emily Brady, Review of Ethics and the Built Environment in Environmental Values 11 (2002): 509-11.
"[I]n the last decade scholars have begun to raise new arguments about the merits of ethics in architectural design. One of the most interesting volumes published on this topic in recent years was Warwick Fox's edited compilation on Ethics and the Built Environment (2000). In this work a range of authors, under Fox's guidance, offer a series of proposals concerning the impact of buildings on social and physical environments. The book contains a strong call for architects to design in an ecologically sensitive way and to take account of the ultimate impact of their work ... As editor of this volume Fox is to be congratulated that the chapters remain typically balanced and avoid simplistic answers in favour of encouraging more detailed consideration of these topics in future research." -- Michael Ostwald, Nexus Network Journal 10 (2008): 195-198.
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Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism (originally published by Shambhala Publications, Boston, 1990; subsequently republished in the US by The State University of New York Press, 1995, and in the UK and Europe by Green Books, Totnes, Devon: Green Books, 1995)
"It is destined to be a classic in the field." -- Eugene Hargrove, editor of Environmental Ethics, advance review of the ms., carried on the cover.
"As a leading deep ecology scholar, Warwick Fox provides the most comprehensive and detailed examination of the development of philosophical deep ecology yet in print." -- George Sessions, co-author of Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, advance review of the ms., carried on the cover.
"The best account to date of the development of deep ecology ... [and] the best and most comprehensive overview of deep ecology yet written … I urge environmental philosophers and everyone else with a concern for the relation of humans to the Earth to seek it out … Chapter six … on its own [which provides a detailed critical analysis of the main approaches in environmental ethics] is worth the price of the book: it is concise, comprehensive, reasonable, and fair." -- Alastair Gunn, Review of Toward a Transpersonal Ecology in Environmental Ethics 15 (1993): 181-83.