BRISTOL — When Christopher Shaw moved to the Adirondacks in 1969, he was looking for something that had been unavailable to him growing up in the suburbs of Schenectady, N.Y. — the kind of intellectual life that arises from, and in turn influences, a region’s sense of “place.” In a 2007 New York Times article about hiking the same Adirondack mountain the American philosopher William James had hiked in 1898, Shaw put it another way: “My own experience in nature had made me curious as to how places as much a … (read more)