Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change

This Handbook offers a broad yet unified treatment of all the philosophical issues connected with climate change, ranging from foundational puzzles to detailed applications. It addresses the philosophical foundations of the discussion on the ethical, social, political and legal impacts of climate change. It covers all branches of philosophy that are relevant to the understanding of the premises and implications of the impacts on human, animal and natural 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 impact of climate change. It studies the ethical and political issues connected with and resulting from climate change, and puts it all in an environmental and historical context. In addition, the book offers solutions to the main philosophical puzzles and problems, and provides 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.

• Philosophy of Climate Change
• Philosophical Issues of Climate Science
• Anthropogenic Drivers of Climate Change
• Accounting for Past and Future Climate Changes
• Societal Impacts of Climate Change
• Economics of Climate Change
• Climate Change and Legal Theory
• Climate Change and Political Science
• Climate Change and History
• Climate Change and Cultural Geography
• Climate Change and Semiotics
• Climate Change, Post-Humanism and Critical Animal Studies
• Climate Change and Ethics
• Climate Change and Deontology
• Climate Change and Population Ethics
• Climate Change and Environmental Ethics
• Climate Change and Business Ethics
• Climate Change and the Ethics of Technology
• Climate Change and the Ethics of Food and Agriculture
• The Ethics of Geoengineering

• Department of Political Science, Guido Carli Free International University, ROMA, Italy

  Gianfranco Pellegrino

• Department of Political Science, Guido Carli Free University, Rome, Italy

  Marcello Di Paola

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.