Philosophy and Climate Change

Philosophy and Climate Change

Author: Mark Budolfson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-04-01

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 0192516124

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Climate change is poised to threaten, disrupt, and transform human life, and the social, economic, and political institutions that structure it. Philosophy and Climate Change argues that understanding climate change, and discussing how to address it, should be at the very center of our public conversation. It shows that philosophy can make an enormous contribution to that conversation, but only if both philosophers and non-philosophers understand what it can contribute. The sixteen original articles collected in this volume both illustrate the diverse ways that philosophy can contribute to this conversation, and ways in which thinking about climate change can help to illuminate a range of topics of independent interest to philosophers.


Philosophy and the Climate Crisis

Philosophy and the Climate Crisis

Author: Byron Williston

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-10-11

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1000200663

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This book explores how the history of philosophy can orient us to the new reality brought on by the climate crisis. If we understand the climate crisis as a deeply existential one, it can help to examine the way past philosophers responded to similar crises in their times. This book explores five past crises, each involving a unique form of collective trauma. These events—war, occupation, exile, scientific revolution and political revolution—inspired the philosophers to remake the whole world in thought, to construct a metaphysics. Williston distills a key intellectual innovation from each metaphysical system: • That political power must be constrained by knowledge of the climate system (Plato) • That ethical and political reasoning must be informed by care or love of the ecological whole (Augustine) • That we must enhance the design of the technosphere (Descartes) • That we must conceive the Earth as an internally complex system (Spinoza) • And that we must grant rights to anyone or anything—ultimately the Earth system itself—whose vital interests are threatened by the effects of climate change (Hegel). Philosophy and the Climate Crisis will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, environmental philosophy and ethics and the environmental humanities.


Philosophy and Climate Science

Philosophy and Climate Science

Author: Eric Winsberg

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-04-12

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1107195691

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A comprehensive and accessible introduction, as well as an original contribution, to the main philosophical issues raised by climate science.


Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change

Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change

Author: Martin Bunzl

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-25

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1317643054

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When it comes to climate change, the greatest difficulty we face is that we do not know the likely degree of change or its cost, which means that environmental policy decisions have to be made under uncertainty. This book offers an accessible philosophical treatment of the broad range of ethical and policy challenges posed by climate change uncertainty. Drawing on both the philosophy of science and ethics, Martin Bunzl shows how tackling climate change revolves around weighing up our interests now against those of future generations, which requires that we examine our assumptions about the value of present costs versus future benefits. In an engaging, conversational style, Bunzl looks at questions such as our responsibility towards non-human life, the interests of the developing and developed worlds, and how the circumstances of poverty shape the perception of risk, ultimate developing and defending a view of humanity and its place in the world that makes sense of our duty to Nature without treating it as a rights bearer. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental studies, philosophy, politics and sociology as well as policy makers.


How to Think about the Climate Crisis

How to Think about the Climate Crisis

Author: Graham Parkes

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-11-26

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1350158895

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**Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2021** Coping with the climate crisis is the greatest challenge we face as a species. We know the main task is to reduce our emissions as rapidly as possible to minimise the harm to the world's population now and for generations to come. What on earth can philosophy offer us? In this compelling account of a problem we think we know inside out, the philosopher Graham Parkes outlines the climatic predicament we are in and how we got here, and explains how we can think about it anew by considering the relevant history, science, economics, politics and, for the first time, the philosophies underpinning them. Introducing the reality of global warming and its increasingly dire consequences, he identifies the immediate obstructions to coping with the problem, outlines the libertarian ideology behind them and shows how they can be circumvented. Drawing on the wisdom of the ancients in both the East-Asian and Western traditions (as embodied in such figures as Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Dogen, Plato, Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius and Nietzsche), Parkes shows how a greater awareness of non-Western philosophies, and especially the Confucian political philosophy advocated by China, can help us deal effectively with climate change and thrive in a greener future. If some dominant Western philosophical ideas and their instantiation in politics and modern technology got us into our current crisis, Parkes demonstrates persuasively that expanding our philosophical horizons will surely help get us out.


How to Think Seriously about the Planet

How to Think Seriously about the Planet

Author: Roger Scruton

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-10

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 0199371245

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Roger Scruton here makes a plea to rescue environmental politics from the activist movements and to return them to the people. The book defends the legacy of home-building and practical reasoning with which ordinary human beings solve their environmental problems, and attacks the alarmism and hysteria that are being used to uproot these resources, while putting nothing coherent in their place.


Climate Justice

Climate Justice

Author: S. M. Ravi Kanbur

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0198813244

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Climate justice requires sharing the burdens and benefits of climate change and its resolution equitably and fairly. This book brings together economic and philosophical discourse on climate justice in order to support public policy dialogue on the topic.


Philosophical Foundations of Climate Change Policy

Philosophical Foundations of Climate Change Policy

Author: Joseph Heath

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0197567983

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"Although the task of formulating an appropriate policy response to the problem of anthropogenic climate change is one that raises a number of very difficult normative issues, environmental ethicists have not played an influential role in government deliberations. This is primarily due to their rejection of many of the assumptions that structure the debates over policy. This book offers a philosophical defense of these assumptions, in order to overcome the major conceptual barriers to the participation of philosophers in these debates. There are five important barriers: First, the policy debate presupposes a stance of liberal neutrality, as a result of which it does not privilege any particular set of environmental values over other concerns. Second, it assumes ongoing economic growth, along with a commitment to what is sometimes called a weak sustainability framework when analyzing the value of the bequest being made to future generations. Third, it treats climate change as fundamentally a collective action problem, not an issue of distributive justice. Fourth, there is the acceptance of cost-benefit analysis, or more precisely, the view that a carbon pricing regime should be guided by our best estimate of the social cost of carbon. And finally, there is the view that when this calculation is undertaken, it is permissible to discount costs and benefits, depending on how far removed they are from the present. This book attempts to make explicit and defend these presuppositions, and in so doing offer philosophical foundations for the debate over climate change policy"--


Climate Change and Justice

Climate Change and Justice

Author: Jeremy Moss

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-11-13

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1107093759

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This collection sheds new light on the key ethical issues of climate change justice.


Religion, Language, and the Human Mind

Religion, Language, and the Human Mind

Author: Paul Chilton

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-04-03

Total Pages: 537

ISBN-13: 0190636661

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What is religion? How does it work? Many natural abilities of the human mind are involved, and crucial among them is the ability to use language. This volume brings together research from linguistics, cognitive science and neuroscience, as well as from religious studies, to understand the phenomena of religion as a distinctly human enterprise. The book is divided into three parts, each part preceded by a full introductory chapter by the editors that discusses modern scientific approaches to religion and the application of modern linguistics, particularly cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. Part I surveys the development of modern studies of religious language and the diverse disciplinary strands that have emerged. Beginning with descriptive approaches to religious language and the problem of describing religious concepts across languages, chapters introduce the turn to cognition in linguistics and also in theology, and explore the brain's contrasting capacities, in particular its capacity for language and metaphor. Part II continues the discussion of metaphor - the natural ability by which humans draw on basic knowledge of the world in order to explore abstractions and intangibles. Specialists in particular religions apply conceptual metaphor theory in various ways, covering several major religious traditions-Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism. Part III seeks to open up new horizons for cognitive-linguistic research on religion, looking beyond written texts to the ways in which language is integrated with other modalities, including ritual, religious art, and religious electronic media. Chapters in Part III introduce readers to a range of technical instruments that have been developed within cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis in recent years. What unfolds ultimately is the idea that the embodied cognition of humans is the basis not only of their languages, but also of their religions.