Agriculture & Philosophy Agricultural Science in Philosophy Lindsay Falvey TSU Press © Copyright retained by the author. The text words may be copied in any form in context for educational and related purposes. For other purposes, permission should be requested from the author. Title: Agriculture & Philosophy: agricultural science in philosophy / J. Lindsay Falvey (author). Published: Thaksin University Press, 2020. Content Types: Text Subjects: Philosophy & Religion Technology, Engineering, Agriculture. Australian Target Audience: specialized Summary: Agriculture and philosophy have been integrally linked across history and remain so. Philosophy, defined as wise means of humans being at ease in nature, has been fundamental to humans from pre-historical times and expressed in various forms. Those philosophical forms have included myths and legends that explained unfathomable matters to our forebears, and which informed the later development of written philosophy in the form of religious scriptures. Scriptures have thereby been the major written vehicle of philosophy for most of history and across cultures. The language employed in such philosophy relied on agricultural metaphor and used agriculture itself as the means of understanding humans as part of nature, rather than an element standing apart and observing or manipulating. With the development of natural philosophy, which became known as science, it became a major modern contribution to useful knowledge - knowledge that increased contentment and wellbeing, or philosophy. Combining myth, religion, and other knowledge from the world's major cultures, philosophy is discussed using examples from the longest and most widespread human interaction with nature, agriculture. The Enlightenment's philosophical product of agricultural science thus unifies the theme, and supports the ancient conclusion that humans' thoughts and actions form part of nature, and may even be components of a wider interaction than can be comprehended from current approaches. Notes: Multiple formats will be published Prepublication record (machine generated from publisher information) Language: English ISBN: 9780975100073 Libraries Australia ID: 66163422 Contributed by: Libraries Australia TSU Press an imprint of Thaksin University, Songkhla, Thailand. ii Agriculture & Philosophy - Falvey Table of Contents Page Author’s Preface vii Prologue 1 Chapter 1 – History, Agriculture and Philosophy 4 Where to Begin? 4 The West’s Emergence 8 Panaceas 10 Innovation & Nature 14 Genetics, Climate & Change 17 Adaptive Food Production 20 Chapter 2 – Pan-disciplinary Philosophy 25 Confusion in Language 25 Some Terminology 27 Integrated Philosophy 30 Scientific Philosophy 33 Why Philosophize 36 Chapter 3 – Agriculture, Science & Philosophy 44 Feeding Civilization 44 Agricultural History 46 Philosophical Issues in Agriculture 50 Contextualizing Issues 54 Chapter 4 – Belief, Religion and Philosophy 58 Cultural Literacy 58 Philosophy’s Emergence 60 Integrating Theology 64 Beliefs and -isms 67 Moral Agriculture 70 Evolutionary Philosophy 74 Chapter 5 – Myth, Folklore & Tradition 78 The Utility of Myth 78 Myths Across Culture 80 Agricultural Folklore 85 Agriculture & Philosophy - Falvey iii Agricultural Divinities 89 A Myth of Our Culture 90 Chapter 6 – Eastern Philosophy & Agriculture 95 The Axial Age 95 Indian Traditions 98 Chinese Traditions 105 Other Eastern Traditions 116 Chapter 7 – Western Philosophy: Sumerians to Spinoza Revolutionary Thought 121 Sumeria to Greece 122 Greek Gods 124 Greece to Rome 127 Roman Agriculture & Philosophy 128 Food & Philosophy 132 Europe after Rome 134 Spinozist Agriculture 139 Chapter 8 – The Enlightenment & Agriculture 142 Reason 142 Agriculture in The Enlightenment 144 Natural Philosophy to Science 145 Enlightened Self-Interest 149 Enlightenment Ideas 151 The Scottish Enlightenment 153 Adam Smith & Agriculture 161 Ongoing Enlightenment 164 Chapter 9 – Agrarian Philosophy 167 Literalism’s Limitations 167 Christian Agrarianism 168 Agrarian Ethics 178 ‘Noble’ Peasant Agrarianism 182 Agrarian Faith 184 Agrarianism & Technology 185 Stewardship 187 Chapter 10 – Agriculture & Ethics 191 Meta Issues 191 Ethical Theory 192 iv Agriculture & Philosophy - Falvey Humans as Nature 194 Ethical Dilemmas 197 Ethics and Breeding 198 Choice & Risk 200 Futile Ethical Law 201 Animal Welfare 204 Livestock & Nutrition Ethics 210 Civilization and Its Discontents 213 Respect in Philosophy 215 Consumer Ethics 216 Food and Conflict 219 Chapter 11 – Unifying Understanding 222 Emerging from the Enlightenment 222 Culture, Agriculture and Philosophy 225 Science in Philosophy 229 The Gaia Hypothesis 233 Chapter 12 – Integrated Philosophy 236 Commonalities 236 Commonalities in Morality 240 Expertise 243 Advancing by Integration 245 Stumbling Understanding 248 Goods & Bads 250 Global Megatrends 252 Epilogue 256 Endnotes 265 INDEX 301 Agriculture & Philosophy - Falvey v Boxes, Figure & Tables List of Boxes Science ≠ Technology Grain Brain ‘Organic’ Agriculture Relative Ethics Food for Thought Georgics Poetry and Science Reconnecting to Farming Livestock Save Lives Peace in Animal Welfare Scientific Rhetoric List of Figures Figure 1. The Hazardous Path from Food Insecurity to Sustainability Figure 2. Interactions between Agricultural Science and Philosophy Figure 3. The Tree of Knowledge linked to Agricultural Science Figure 4. Components of Academic Philosophy Figure 5. Centres of Origin Identified by Vavilov Figure 6. Hegelian Insights Simplified as a Cycle Figure 7. A Representation of the Dreamtime Figure 8. The Individual’s Metamorphosis & the Aeneas Story Figure 9. ‘Axial Age’ Centres of Philosophical Advance, c. 500 BCE Figure 10. Summary Timeline of Indian Philosophy Figure 11. Summary Timeline of East Asia Philosophy Figure 14. Cereal Yields in the United Kingdom Figure 15. Smith’s Philosophy and the Centrality of Agriculture Figure 16. Biblical Agrarianism and Sustainability Figure 17. Interactions: Prod’n, Consumers, Organis’n & Philosophy Figure 18. Pathways Between Livestock , Nutrition and Health. Figure 20. Darwin’s First Sketch of an Evolutionary Tree List of Tables Table 1. Agrarian Claims Table 2. Some Philosopher’s Views on Agriculture and Food Table 3. Some Philosophers’ Views on Meat Consumption vi Agriculture & Philosophy - Falvey Author’s Preface A number of questions have stayed with me over the decades, which has led me to both dead-ends and bountiful paths. The book, which I hope you are about to read, is an output of one of those latter fruitful journeys. This journey began with wide reading around themes that piqued my interest in combination with my continuing involvement in what I see as the most important human innovation – agriculture and its sciences. This means that the book contains some matters on which I am well informed, and others in which I am an amateur. Over the past 20 years I have always had a major writing project – something that has provided me with intellectual continuity among the otherwise disparate demands of life, and which is portable enough to suit my peripatetic profession. I am no philosopher in the academic sense, and only marginally so in the popular sense. Yet I have boldly, and possibly foolishly, sought to revive the intent of philosophy itself and to show it as the proper home of agricultural science and all useful learned pursuits. ‘Useful’ in this sense means knowledge that increases human wellbeing and assists in self- understanding within incomprehensibly complex nature. I imagined I could do this by reading the great and not-so-great philosophers and noting their references to agriculture and science. How naïve was I? As it transpired, my naivety allowed me to avoid that slough of despond that is mired by academic philosophy’s classifications – and this proved to be advantageous to my quest. By treating philosophy as the human search for comfort beginning in prehistory and proceeding through myth and folklore to religion to natural philosophy and to modern science, I found continuums that might have eluded me if I had focussed my view through the lenses of modern schools. Is this hubris? Perhaps – but in any case, it has allowed me to challenge Western worldviews that have been projected onto interpretations of other cultures. Secondly, it has permitted an objective inclusion of religion in both its profound and folk forms to be treated with respect as a cultural expression of applied philosophy. Thirdly, by focusing on the nexus between agriculture, its sciences and philosophy, the exceptional innovations that now feed billions serve to highlight that human genius takes a wide perspective. Bringing subjects uncommon to agricultural science into discussion is hardly a great career move these days. I am fortunate, at this late stage, Agriculture & Philosophy - Falvey vii to be unconcerned and even disdainful of such criticisms – not the least because one message of the book is that agricultural science impoverishes itself when it operates as technology separated from context. I can claim some experience in integrating fields of knowledge and experience through previous books, including ‘Religion and Agriculture’, ‘Beliefs that Bias Food & Agriculture’, broad discussions of ‘sustainability’ and even others that integrate religio-cultural themes. But this book stands apart in its approach potentially spanning all human experience and knowledge. Of course, this means that I could only hope to capture a few points, and I think those presented are sufficient