Department of Philosophy

Permanent URI for this communityhttps://hdl.handle.net/10217/100483

These digital collections contain theses, dissertations, and faculty publications from the Department of Philosophy. Also included is a collection of works by Rolston Holmes III, a philosopher who is a University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University, known for his contributions to environmental ethics and the relationship between science and religion.

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Open Access
Trail log - 1960-1969
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1960-1969) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author
These are records Rolston kept of trails and trips, only of special trips before he moved West to Colorado. 1960-1964. No records. 1965. July 29-August 23. Wilderness horseback trip in the San Juan Mountains, vicinity of Durango, Colorado. 1966. Rolston accompanies his wife to the University of Maine. While she takes a class re-certifying her teaching certificate, Rolston prowls the Maine woods. Flora of Maine Sphagnum bogs. Rolston climbs Mt. Katahdin, also The Traveler. Impressions of New England. Trip to nearby Canada. Bay of Fundy and the tidal bore. 1967. July 13-July 23. Rolston led Boy Scout trip to Philmont Scout Ranch, New Mexico; July 27-August 5. Grand Canyon River Run, Lee's Ferry to Lake Mead followed by text of an article published as "Bristolian Shoots Rapids on American's Wildest River," Bristol (Virginia) Herald Courier, August 27, 1967, p., 5A. 1968. Rolston moved to Colorado August 1968 and records are more thorough afterward; Local Colorado trails and trips, fall 1968. 1969. Local Colorado trails and trips.
Open Access
September hawking on Clinch Mountain
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1964-09) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Virginia Commission of Game and Inland Fisheries, publisher
Fall raptor migrations observed from Clinch Mountain, Washington County, Virginia, late 1950s, early 1960s.
Open Access
Bristolian shoots rapids on America's wildest river
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1967) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Bristol Herald Courier, publisher
Rolston's account of a river run through the Grand Canyon, Lee's Ferry to Lake Mead, July 27-August 5, 1967.
Open Access
Mystery and majesty in Washington County
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1968-11) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Virginia Commission of Game and Inland Fisheries, publisher
Rolston's accounts exploring fauna, flora, and natural history in Washington County, Southwestern Virginia, during a decade of residence there, 1960s. A tribute to the Southern Appalachian hills that once were home.
Open Access
Responsible man in reformed theology: Calvin versus the Westminister Confession
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1970) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Cambridge University Press, publisher
In the concept of the essential nature of responsible persons, Calvin and the Calvinists that followed him differed significantly. The Calvinists formulated what they called a double covenant between God and humans, a covenant of works and a covenant of grace. Humans were placed in creation and expected to keep God's law, and to be judged on their merits. Humans sinned, broken God's law and failed to keep this covenant. On this basis they are judged, and lost. In the covenant of grace, God enters and redeems human life by grace, and this is the Biblical story in Israel, fulfilled in Christ. The danger that has beset Reformed thought is that in its use of covenant, nature, law, and grace, it makes of the Christian faith something which comes in where human powers fail. Humans need God only for the mending of life's wrongness, to rescue persons from their irresponsibility. The authentic Reformed witness makes place for this, but goes beyond. Religion belongs not just to the weakness of life, but also to its strength. A person's fundamental need for communion with a gracious God springs not merely from redemption, but more basically from one's dignity as a creature formed for grace. Grace belongs before sin, not less than after. In grace God made and makes responsible persons.
Open Access
Trail log - 1970-1979
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1970-1979) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author
Rolston accounts of climbs of Long's Peak, Rocky Mountain National Park in 1970 and 1971. Accounts of hiking and backpacking, Appalachian Trail, Shenandoah National Park, Virginia. Accounts of Rawah Mountains, Mt. Elbert, Mt. Massive, Indian Peaks, Colorado, Yellowstone National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, Arches National Park, 1970-1979.
Open Access
Hewn and cleft from this rock: meditation at the PreCambrian contact
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1971) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, publisher
Encounter with the Precambrian contact exposed at Pardee Point in Doe River Gorge, East Tennessee, brings reflections about human origins, evolving and cleft from ancient rocks. Geochemistry has its sequel in biochemistry. The hiker crosses that fossil sequence recorded in the strata. A discontinuity is crossed with the coming of humans: A sheriff crossing the contact in search of moonshiners. The rocks are a sacrament that overlie a Presence.
Open Access
Philosophical aspects of the environment
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1973) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Environmental Resources Center, Colorado State University, publisher
Ecosystem science is being often offered as an ultimate science that synthesizes even the arts and the humanities. Like the laws of personal health, the laws of ecosystemic health may be obeyed or broken, only to be reckoned with at length. The ecosciences are underscoring the continuities so as to humble the pride of the muscular West. Kept in its environmental context, our humanity is not absolutely "in" us, but is rather "in" our world dialogue. Humans may and must moderate or mind their world, yet the more competently and effectively they manipulate, the more urgently they must respect the worth of their Earth. Any human dominion ought to be a commonwealth that provides for the integrity of all its component members, with humans governing with care and love.
Open Access
Community: ecological and ecumenical
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1973) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Iliff Theological Seminary (Denver), publisher
The era of ecology brings a vision of one world environmentally. The ecumenical movement hopes for a community and dialogue of faiths. Both have a common etymological root in the Greek word "oikos," household. These two contemporary concerns, one in science, one in religion, offer the possibility of a more comprehensive sense of community. In the Bible, the earliest sin is ecological, humans despise their garden earth, and the sin of brother against brother follows. Our charge is to live on earth and keep it. Keeping Eden requires that we be our brothers's keeper.
Open Access
Lake Solitude: the individual in wildness
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1975) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, publisher
Lake Solitude, in remote Rocky Mountain National Park, offers a solitary traveler a place to seek continuities and discontinuities with nature, a communion of opposites. To travel into the wilderness is to go into what one is not, so that in returning to its natural complement, mind grasps itself. Nature thrusts humans into an immense solitude, but that is her grandest gift. This environmental resistance frees us for and impels us toward centered personality.
Open Access
Schlick's Responsible man
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1975) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author
A criticism of the concept of responsibility in the work of Moritz Schlick. The solution, or dissolution, of moral responsibility is not nearly so simple as Schlick has proposed. Upon analysis, his hope of retaining responsibility under ethics as an applied science collapses.
Open Access
Is there an ecological ethic?
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1975) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; University of Chicago Press, publisher
The environment is on the world agenda, also on the ethical frontier, for the foreseeable future. Environmental ethics is about saving things past, still present. Environmental ethics is equally about future nature, without analogy in our past. Living at one of the ruptures of history, modern cultures threaten the stability, beauty, and integrity of Earth, and thereby of the cultures superposed on Earth. Environmental ethics must find a satisfactory fit for humans in the larger communities of life on Earth.
Open Access
A three-valued interpretation for a relevance logic
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1976-09) Johnson, Fred (Frederick A.), author; Department of Philosophical Studies, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, publisher
In this paper an entailment relation which holds between certain propositions of the propositional calculus will be defined both syntactically and semantically. Some theorems about this relation will show why one could not follow Lewis to prove that a contradiction entails, for the notion of entailment discussed below, every proposition.
Open Access
A natural deduction relevance logic
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1977) Johnson, Fred (Frederick A.), author; Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sceinces, publisher
Open Access
The Pasqueflower
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1979) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; American Museum of Natural History, publisher
The Pasqueflower surviving through winter, blooming at the Pasque, Easter, offers a glimpse of the precocious exuberance of life, a token of the covenant of life to continue in beauty despite the wintry storms. To pause at first encountering it in spring is to find a moment of truth, a moment of memory and promise. Let winters come, life will flower on as long as Earth shall last.
Open Access
Can and ought we to follow nature?
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1979) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies, publisher
"Nature knows best" is reconsidered from an ecological perspective which suggests that we ought to follow nature. The phrase "follow nature" has many meanings. In an absolute law-of-nature sense, persons invariably and necessarily act in accordance with natural laws, and thus cannot but follow nature. In an artifactual sense, all deliberate human conduct is viewed as unnatural, and thus it is impossible to follow nature. As a result, the answer to the question, whether we can and ought to follow nature, must be sought in a relative sense according to which human conduct is sometimes more and sometimes less natural. Four specific relative senses are examined: a homeostatic sense, an imitative ethical sense, an axiological sense, and a tutorial sense. Nature can be followed in a homeostatic sense in which human conduct utilizes natural laws for our well-being in a stable environment, but this following is nonmoral since the moral elements can be separated from it. Nature cannot be followed in an imitative ethical sense because nature itself is either amoral or, by some accounts, immoral. Guidance for inter-human ethical conduct, therefore, must be sought not in nature, but in human culture. Nevertheless, in an axiological sense, persons can and ought to follow nature by viewing it as an object of orienting interest and value. In this connection, three environments are distinguished for human well-being in which we can and ought to participate-the urban, the rural, and the wild. Finally, in a tutorial sense, persons can and ought to follow nature by letting it teach us something of our human role, our place, and our appropriate character in the natural system as a whole. In this last sense, "following nature" is commended to anyone who seeks in his human conduct to maintain a good fit with the natural environment-a sense of following nature involving both efficiency and wisdom.
Open Access
Nature and human emotions
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1979) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; The Applied Philosophy Program, publisher
Our encounter with nature is as passionate as it is cognitive. We have emotions of discontinuity before a nature we resist and fear. Our centripetal self maintains its integrity against the centrifugal wildness. There are also emotions of continuity, a nature we embrace and love--our country, the hills and rivers of home. Human emotions defend the self, aloft and transcendent over nature, but they ought also fit us to the surrounding natural environment. These are emotions that we all live by; they are emotions that some of us live for.
Open Access
Copi's method of deduction
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1979-04) Johnson, Fred (Frederick A.), author; Duke University Press, publisher
Open Access
Save Poudre as signature of eternity
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1979-1989) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Fort Collins Coloradoan, publisher
Advocating saving the Poudre River as wild and scenic, against development and dams for irrigation and residential water. The Poudre River canyon is an age-old gorge with a river still flowing free, an impressive signature of time and eternity. Having it near a growing metropolitan area, Fort Collins, is especially important for keeping a sense of perspective in the Rocky Mountain West. Saving the Poudre preserves wildness and simultaneously keeps those who visit it better proportioned persons.
Open Access
Deductively-inductively
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 1980) Johnson, Fred (Frederick A.), author; University of Windsor, publisher
Johnson separates arguments from acts of arguing and claim that the deductive/inductive distinction belongs with the latter not with the former.