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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.
Climate Change and Philosophy presents ten original essays by an international team of expert contributors, exploring the important contribution philosophical inquiry can make to contemporary debates to do with climate change and the global environment. Examining this hugely topical issue through the lens of environmental philosophy, political theory, philosophy of technology, philosophy of education and feminist theory, these essays interrogate some of the presumptions that inform modernity and our interaction with natural processes. The book asks fundamental questions about human nature and, more importantly, the concept of 'nature' itself. The conceptual frameworks presented here contribute to an understanding of the processes of change, of social transformation, and the means of adapting to the constraints that problems such as climate change pose. The book proposes a way of beginning the important task of rethinking the relationship between humanity and the natural environment. Through enquiry into the basic philosophical principles that inform modern society, each author asserts that reflection informs change and that change is both required and possible in the context of the environmental crisis facing us today.
A comprehensive and accessible introduction, as well as an original contribution, to the main philosophical issues raised by climate science.
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.
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.
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.
"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"--
In this volume, Stephen M. Gardiner and David A. Weisbach present arguments for and against the relevance of ethics to global climate policy. Gardiner argues that climate change is fundamentally an ethical issue, since it is an early instance of a distinctive challenge to ethical action (the perfect moral storm), and ethical concerns (such as with justice, rights, political legitimacy, community and humanity's relationship to nature) are at the heart of many of the decisions that need to be made. Consequently, climate policy that ignores ethics is at risk of "solving" the wrong problem, perhaps even to the extreme of endorsing forms of climate extortion. This is especially true of policy based on narrow forms of economic self-interest. By contrast, Weisbach argues that existing ethical theories are not well suited to addressing climate change. As applied to climate change, existing ethical theories suffer from internal logical problems and suggest infeasible strategies. Rather than following failed theories or waiting indefinitely for new and better ones, Weisbach argues that central motivation for climate policy is straightforward: it is in their common interest for people and nations to agree to policies that dramatically reduce emissions to prevent terrible harms.
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.
This collection sheds new light on the key ethical issues of climate change justice.