Introduction

Climate change is a contemporary problem that does not have a long philosophical history. The obvious reason for this is that our knowledge concerning climate change is relatively recent, certainly when viewed from the background of a history of philosophy which spans more than 2000 years. Where other contemporary problems like poverty, disease and war have been with us more or less since the beginnings of philosophy, this is not so with climate change, at least not with the dramatic global climate change caused by our human (inter)actions.

Not only is there no philosophical tradition to speak of when it comes to thinking about climate change, the question also arises whether climate change should even be considered a properly delineated philosophical topic.  This is not because climate change is a scientific fact (so is the existence of poverty, disease and war). Rather, it is because climate change is a phenomenon that seems to be tied to a great number of other problems (e.g., poverty and war) and to almost every philosophical discipline you can think of. Ethics is certainly relevant, but we also have epistemology and philosophy of science to look at climate science (e.g., when it comes to risk and uncertainty), and philosophy of language can investigate how we (can or should) talk about climate change. How then to organize our philosophical thinking about such a complex and multi-faceted topic like climate change?

In this book, the methodological approach to the topic of climate change focuses on the notion of a philosophical tool or method. A philosophical tool is a particular philosophical concept or distinction, a philosophical method is a more general way of thinking about a problem that gives us new insights about the problem, in our case climate change.  There are already a few resources available to learn about philosophical tools and methods, as listed in the references below. What this book attempts to do is apply a number of these tools and methods to the problem of climate change.

This book was created as an open educational resource in the course Philosophy beyond Academia at the University of Groningen in 2024. Except for this introduction, all of the chapters have been created by students of the MA Philosophy Programme of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Groningen.

This book is the second book in a series of open educational resources applying philosophical tools and methods to a particular topic. In the past, philosophical tools and methods were applied to the topic of migration in the open educational resource Migration: A Philosophical Toolkit. This book follows a similar setup, and parts of this introduction have been adapted from the introduction to that book.

Structure of the Chapters

For the philosophical tools and methods covered in this book, each chapter starts with a description of the philosophical tool or method itself. This description consists of:

1. a general exposition of the tool or method,
2. key features, elements or steps that are central to applying the tool or method to a particular topic or question,
3. key authors and central works associated with the tool or method, and
4. references to literature and links to other media where readers can find more information about the tool or method.

After the description, the chapter applies the tool or method to a particular topic or problem related to climate change. Each application:

1. describes the topic or problem,
2. applies the tool or method to the topic or problem, identifying the key features of the tool or method as covered in the description part,
3. presents the results and added value of applying the philosophical tool or method to the topic or problem, and
4. presents some philosophical exercises the reader can do to explore the philosophical tool or method and/or the topic further.

References

I. M. Bocheński. Die zeitgenössischen Denkmethoden. Francke Verlag, 1954.

Daniel Dennett. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.

Peter Fosl & Julian Baggini. The Philosopher′s Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods. Wiley Blackwell, 2020. (Third Edition)

Marc Pauly (ed.). Migration: A Philosophical Toolkit. Pressbooks, 2023. Available from https://opentextbooks.rug.nl/philosophymigration/

Tatjana Schönwälder-Kuntze. Philosophische Methoden zur Einführung. Junius, 2015.

Note concerning Picture & Cover

The picture displayed in this chapter was taken by Marc Pauly on January 4th, 2024 in the German Emsland region at a time of flooding. The cover picture was created by Manoesch Wouwenaar using Canva and Goodstudio.