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This chapter addresses the contemporary environmental crisis as one that requires fundamental societal shifts of values and ethical relations to the natural world. It discusses the important and progressive changes that have occurred in perceptions of nature during the past half century, changes that have resulted in improved stewardship of aspects of the natural world. It advocates a biocultural perspective, a response that views human values and ethical relations toward the natural world as bounded by species biological requirements, but shaped and influenced by individual and cultural learning and experience.

Chapter 4, “Children,” shows how Catholic identities are implicated in the different logics underlying childrearing approaches in each parish, especially in the two groups’ different religious anthropologies, or perceptions of human nature, whichground their conceptions of childhood. These anthropologies reflect each group's Catholic identity and support local cultures that emphasize different parenting strategies. They also embody distinct visions of moral living that, although having some common concerns, also oppose one another, thereby supporting polarization among Catholics. The anthropology grounding the culture of childhood at Assumption emphasizes a perception of humans as sinful, an ethic of parental protection, and the concerted cultivation of virtue in children. At St. Brigitta, perceptions of childhood are linked to understandings of human psychological and spiritual development through the life course, leading to childrearing strategies in which parents both protect children and expose them to social settings and problems different than their own.

This chapter analyzes the movie Memento and how the questions it poses is analogous with the essay “The Extended Mind.” The essay claims that mental states, including states of believing, could be grounded in physical traces that remained firmly outside the mind, as long as a few simple conditions are met. This chapter attempts to answer objections to this argument—especially those focusing on the contrast between the intrinsic content of neural symbols and the merely derived content of external inscriptions, those focusing on the demarcation of scientific domains via natural kinds, and those focusing on the ultimate locus of agentive control and the nature of perception versus introspection. This chapter begins the discussion through the presentation of the original argument from Clark and Chalmers.

This chapter examines the impact the City of Cape Town, a growing city in the megadiverse Cape Floristic Region, has on biodiversity and ecosystem services within and beyond its boundaries. A brief history of the impacts of people on nature in this region is provided which argues that these are not divorced from social, economic, and political factors. These in turn influence people’s perceptions of nature. Impacts are examined through the lenses of housing a growing city and provisioning the city. Many regulatory and cultural ecosystem services are best managed within the boundaries of the city. Provisioning ecosystem services such as food and water are largely provided by the environment around the city. Urbanization and agriculture have tended to reduce the multiple services that a landscape can deliver, while threatening one-of-a-kind biodiversity. Water, a limited resource, is further constrained by invasive species and activities which pollute or disrupt the water cycle. Measures to ensure sustainability of delivery of ecosystem goods and services from natural resources, while ensuring that biodiversity is secured, are assessed. These include initiatives at local and national government, business, NGO, and individual levels. For measures towards sustainability to be effective, evidence suggests that people’s values need to be considered. Ethical, social, and economic criteria need to be considered alongside environmental ones in determining pathways to sustainability, and trade-offs may be necessary in developing options that best meet multiple objectives.

The purpose of this chapter is to take a close look at the nature of perceptual content. It begins with a description of naive realism, which is a good enough starting point for further theorizing about the nature of perception. A number of disjunctivists, however, posit that we need to suppose that the objects we perceive are components of the contents of our perceptual experiences in veridical cases. A related consideration is that in cases of illusion, the perceived object appears other than it is, in which case the perceptual experience is intuitively inaccurate. The discussion here is necessary for at least two reasons. First, it is needed to defend some claims made about visual content in Chapter 1. Second, a proper understanding of visual content is essential to understanding the position developed in the next chapter and applied thereafter.