He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Central Lancashire, and his books include Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism;[1] Ethics and the Built Environment (ed.
);[2] A Theory of General Ethics: Human Relationships, Nature, and the Built Environment;[3] and On Beautiful Days Such as This: A Philosopher's Search for Love, Work, Place, Meaning, and Suchlike.
[4] His main areas of philosophical interest are environmental philosophy, General Ethics (a term coined and defined by Fox), and the nature of the interior lives of humans and other animals.
Fox demonstrated this by showing that the process of asking deeper questions could easily lead one to endorse first principles (or "fundamentals") from which one could straightforwardly derive even outrageously anthropocentric conclusions, depending upon the other hypotheses that one made use of in employing Naess's approach to developing a normative system.
[8] Finally, Fox argued that the third idea, of "cultivating wider and deeper identification" with the world around us, was both defensible and distinctive of the deep ecology approach to environmental philosophy.
These forms of identification refer, respectively, to forms of felt commonality with other entities that are brought about through personal involvement with them; through a deep-seated realization of the "utterly astonishing fact"[9] that, like oneself, they too exist (which takes us into the realm of what Wittgenstein himself referred to as the "mystical");[10] and through a deep-seated realization of the fact that we and all other entities are aspects of a single unfolding reality.
Fox makes it clear that he construes "responsiveness" very generally here to include both literal and metaphorical senses of the term, so that this idea applies as much to art and architecture as it does to living and social systems.
[27] Fox provides an overview of the development of his work from deep ecology to the theory of responsive cohesion, as well as broader reflections on "The Ideas Game" in general, in two of the later chapters of his semi-autobiographical/semi-fictional book On Beautiful Days Such as This.