Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change

This Handbook offers a broad yet unified treatment of many philosophical issues connected with climate change, ranging from foundational puzzles to detailed applications. It extends to many branches of philosophy that are relevant to the understanding of the premises and implications of the impacts of climate change on human and nonhuman life on Earth. More specifically, the handbook examines the scientific accounts of climate change as well as its causes. It explores the tools offered by social sciences and humanities to study the societal premises and impacts of climate change as well as delving deeper into the ethical and political issues connected with and resulting from climate change. By doing so, it puts it all in an ecological and historical context. In addition, the book offers solutions to some important philosophical puzzles and problems, and indicates paths of interaction between philosophy and other disciplines.

The discussion about climate change and the mitigation/adaptation policies spans many areas and levels - from abstract science and philosophy to current on-the-ground politics. However, climate change is also a great a philosophical puzzle. Indeed, its existential and practical relevance can be thought to largely derive from the philosophical complications it engenders. Climate change is applied philosophy par excellence. Preventing dangerous anthropogenic climate change needs very good philosophy applied to concrete and specific practical issues. Climate change is an area where scholars from very different provenances should cooperate on equal terms, having in view a common, and really important, purpose - contribute to preventing great burdens and even the extinction of humankind and the destruction of hospitable and valuable non-human nature.

Gianfranco Pellegrino is an Associate Professor at the Political Science Department of LUISS Guido Carli University of Rome. He wrote on climate change, environmental ethics and political theory. He is one of the editors of Canned Heat, Ethics and Politics of Climate Change, Routledge, 2014. His main research interests are environmental ethics, political theory and history of philosophy.

Marcello Di Paola is a researcher at the philosophy department of The University of Vienna, a research and teaching fellow at the departments of political science and business and management at Luiss University in Rome, and a Lecturer in environmental studies at Loyola University of Chicago Rome Center. He is the author of Ethics and Politics of the Built Environment (Springer 2017), One of the Editors of Plant Ethics: Concepts and Applications (Routledge 2018), and the author or Co-Author of various other books and articles in both Italian and English. His main research interests are in sustainability studies, applied ethics and political philosophy.