James D. Wallace treats moral considerations as beliefs about the right and wrong ways of doing things—beliefs whose source and authority are the same as any other kind of practical knowledge. Principles, rules, and norms arise from people's cumulative experience in pursuing their purposes and struggling with the problems they encounter. Moral knowledge, he contends, is excerpted from the bodies of information we have developed so that we will be able to raise our children, govern our communities, build our buildings, heal our ailments, and pursue the many other activities that constitute our lives. According to Wallace, understanding moral norms is a matter of understanding how they, together with the other pertinent items of practical knowledge, guide our complex activities. The more we abstract a moral principle from the concrete contexts in which it operates, Wallace argues, the less intelligible the principle becomes. Wallace's suggestion that difficult moral problems are properly resolved by attending to their context rejects Plato's thesis that immutable, timeless, universal values exist. He illustrates the process of extracting resolutions for moral dilemmas from the practical knowledge involved in concrete problems of law, medicine, and scientific research. Unprecedented problems sometimes evoke disagreement and uncertainty, prompting Wallace to consider controversies in areas as diverse as chess, commerce, and slavery. The final issue Wallace explores is the abortion problem, reasoned from the particularist perspective he advocates.

Open the pages of so many children’s classics—Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, Mister Dog, The Cricket in Times Square, The Rescuers, the Little House books—and you will see page after page of the artistry that brought those stories to life. And behind the illustrations sparking the imagination of generations was a man who had an extraordinary existence. Born in New York City in 1912, Williams was educated in England and trained on the continent. After enduring the Blitz in London, he returned to New York, where he encountered the vibrant art and cultural scene of the 1940s. He made his home first in New York, then Aspen, and finally Guanajuato, Mexico and was married four times. During his life he met people who shaped and exemplified the twentieth century: Winston Churchill, E. B. White and Ursula Nordstrom, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and countless more. This is a biography of Garth Williams as an artist and an illustrator. It is the story of how his journey led him from winning sculpture awards at the Royal College of Art in London, to capturing the essence of frontier life in the American West, to rendering the humanity of beloved animal characters. The biography also explores the historical context that affected Williams’ life and art, both in the old world and the new. Against the frenetic pace of post-war suburbanization, Williams’ illustrations nurtured a connection with the animal world and with a vanishing agrarian life. By tapping into American themes, Williams spoke to a postwar yearning for simplicity. Complete with more than 60 illustrations, this is the first full biography of Garth Williams written with the help and cooperation of his family.

How do we establish the relevance of a moral consideration when doing so is problematic? How are conflicts among relevant considerations properly resolved? James D. Wallace maintains that a successful ethical theory should be able to answer these important questions. Nevertheless, he argues, the leading contemporary moral theories do not satisfactorily address them. In this book, Wallace criticizes the standard philosophical accounts of how we should resolve problems of moral relevance and moral conflict. He proceeds by looking at such accounts as utilitarianism, Kantian moral theory, and intuitionism, and by providing an extended evaluation of Henry Sidgwick's moral epistemology. According to Wallace, these approaches pose difficulties because they all assume that there exist fixed, unchanging standards, rules, or methods that give us explicit directions for the solution of such problems. He then goes on to develop his own, "contextualist," approach, which combines elements of both Aristotelian and pragmatic views. To solve new problems, he asserts, we must adapt what we have learned from past problems to novel circumstances, sometimes appreciably changing our ways of dealing with certain kinds of issues. In adapting our ways of dealing with these issues to unprecedented problems, and in dealing with the conflicts that arise from unprecedented juxtapositions of considerations, we alter and even reform morality.

We spend a great deal of time learning our vocations and avocations as we work at jobs, participate in home life, and take part in civic activities and politics. In doing so, we engage in practices that consist of complex bodies of norms. These practices themselves are bodies of knowledge-often acquired from others-about what we take to be good ways or right ways to do certain things. As we learn how to solve problems and act on this knowledge, the practice itself changes. In Norms and Practices, James D. Wallace shows that norms of all kinds, including ethical norms, are intensely social constructs learned through constant interaction with others. Wallace suggests that ethical norms have long been misunderstood as practice-independent prescriptions for behavior; he regards them instead as items of practical knowledge that are constituents of practices. We are given the luxury of learning from others' mistakes and successes, often in a very informal way. Such lessons from collective or individual experience often carry more weight than do pronouncements from an external source. Wallace shows that practices and norms, including ethical norms within such spheres as biomedical research, family life, and politics, continually change as practitioners face novel problems.

"Cornell Paperback." Includes index. Bibliography: p. 163-165.

This is a biography of Garth Williams as an artist and illustrator, of how his journey led him from sculpture awards at the Royal College of Art to capturing the epitome of frontier life in the West, or etching humanity into beloved animal characters. The biography also explores the historical context that affected Williams' life and art, whether in the Old World or fostering cultural expression in the New--

"The first monographic examination of William Trost Richards's (1833-1905) art in Boston, this exhibition explores the artist's career from his earliest sketches and exemplary Pre-Raphaelite technique of the 1860s, to his late masterful seascapes and landscapes. Richards's landscapes in particular come to light within the context of the nineteenth century's burgeoning appreciation for the environment. The exhibition reveals how Richards's works manifest the Romantics' hieroglyphic interpretation of nature, a metaphor embraced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and reflect nascent scientific discoveries of contemporary geologists who revolutionized understanding of evolution and history. William Trost Richards: Hieroglyphs of Landscape features more than 180 oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sketchbooks, including many seldom-seen works owned by descendants of the artist. Other outstanding contributions come from Bowdoin College Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Davis Museum at Wellesley College; Mark Twain House & Museum; McMullen Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Nantucket Historical Association; Newport Art Museum; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; William Vareika Fine Arts; and many private collectors. An accompanying scholarly catalogue, edited by Jeffery Howe, contains essays by Ethan F. Baxter, Rebecca Bedell, Linda S. Ferber, Howe, and James D. Wallace. The writers probe the artist's background and psychology, illuminating links between his works and the artistic, geologic, and philosophical currents of his era."