Coherence is a term of art in both epistemology and literary criticism, and in both contexts judgments of coherence carry evaluative significance. However, whereas the epistemic use of the term picks out a property of belief sets, the literary use can pick out properties of various elements of a literary work, including its plot, characters, and style. For this reason, some have claimed that literary critics are not concerned with the same concept of coherence as epistemologists. In this article I (...) argue against this claim. Although various nonepistemic notions of coherence figure in literary criticism, the epistemic concept has a mirror image in the literary–critical concept of thematic coherence. Moreover, evidence from literary criticism suggests that thematic coherence can be valuable from a literary-evaluative standpoint because it can be valuable from an epistemic standpoint, in particular by enhancing the credibility of a work's themes or author. My analysis of the notion of thematic coherence thus provides novel support for literary cognitivism, the view that a work's literary-aesthetic merits can depend on its epistemic merits. (shrink)

The intuitions at the core of environmental ethics and of other neglected value realms put pressure on traditional anthropocentric ethics based on monistic value theories. Such pressure is so severe that it has led many to give up on the idea of monistic value theories altogether. I argue that value monism is still preferable to value pluralism and that, indeed, these new challenges are opportunities to vastly improve impoverished traditional theories. I suggest an alternative monistic theory, Richness Theory, and show (...) how it provides an opportunity to capture the needs of both environmental ethics and of our traditional ethics. (shrink)