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carbon is found in all living things. carbon atoms move constantly through

living organisms, the oceans, the atmosphere, and the earth’s crust in what is

known as the carbon cycle. the directions taken by carbon atoms through this

cycle are very complicated and can take millions of years to make a full circle.

all animals, from humans to the dinosaurs are part of the carbon cycle. when

animals eat food, they get carbon in the form of carbohydrates and proteins.

in animals, oxygen combines with food in the cells to produce energy for daily

activity and then gives off carbon. the carbon combines with oxygen to form

carbon dioxide (co2) and is released back into the atmosphere as a waste

product when animals breathe and exhale.

from 145-65 million years ago, earth was much

hotter than today and covered with dense,

tropical swamp forests. the trees and other

plants were immense and

provided an endless supply of

food for the giant animals that

roamed the land. somewhere in

the air above one of these

forests, a lone carbon atom has joined

up with two oxygen atoms to form a molecule of co2.

the co2 molecule was sucked into the tiny holes (stomata) on the leaf of a

fern plant and joined with sunlight, chlorophyll and water to make food and

energy in the plant’s cells through photosynthesis. the oxygen (o2) from the

co2 molecule was sent back into the atmosphere; the carbon atom (c) was

detached and used to make a molecule of sugar.

if that carbon atom had been eaten instead, a totally

different situation would have developed. let’s say

that a giant plant-eating dinosaur (herbivore) ate the

fern for breakfast, and swallowed the carbon in the

fern in the form of carbohydrates and proteins. in

the process of respiration, oxygen combined with

the carbohydrates and proteins in the dinosaur’s cells

to provide energy for its daily activity.  

relativism, roughly put, is the view that truth and falsity, right and wrong, standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification are products of differing conventions and frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving rise to them. more precisely, “relativism” covers views which maintain that—at a high level of abstraction—at least some class of things have the properties they have (e.g., beautiful, morally good, epistemically justified) not simpliciter, but only relative to a given framework of assessment (e.g., local cultural norms, individual standards), and correspondingly, that the truth of claims attributing these properties holds only once the relevant framework of assessment is specified or supplied. relativists characteristically insist, furthermore, that if something is only relatively so, then there can be no framework-independent vantage point from which the matter of whether the thing in question is so can be established.

relativism has been, in its various guises, both one of the most popular and most reviled philosophical doctrines of our time. defenders see it as a harbinger of tolerance and the only ethical and epistemic stance worthy of the open-minded and tolerant. detractors dismiss it for its alleged incoherence and uncritical intellectual permissiveness. debates about relativism permeate the whole spectrum of philosophical sub-disciplines. from ethics to epistemology, science to religion, political theory to ontology, theories of meaning and even logic, philosophy has felt the need to respond to this heady and seemingly subversive idea. discussions of relativism often also invoke considerations relevant to the very nature and methodology of philosophy and to the division between the so-called “analytic and continental” camps in philosophy. and yet, despite a long history of debate going back to plato and an increasingly large body of writing, it is still difficult to come to an agreed definition of what, at its core, relativism is, and what philosophical import it has. this entry attempts to provide a broad account of the many ways in which “relativism” has been defined, explained, defended and criticized.

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