Course Philosophy, Nature, and Climate change

In the same week as the conference at Aarhus University entitled "Philosophy, Nature, and Climate Change", where leading scholars will present their work on environmental philosophy, a PhD-seminar will take place at AU. The seminar offers doctoral students the opportunity to present and discuss their project, ongoing works, and prospective research projects on topics related to environmental philosophy broadly conceived, both from a historical and contemporary perspective. 

The issue of climate change is an incredibly multivariate phenomenon. Consequently, it has in recent years become increasingly evident that understanding and responding to it requires a highly interdisci-plinary effort. Perhaps the most recognized connection between philosophy and the climate crisis has been environmental ethics, which, drawing on the tradition of ethical theory, has been a vigorous, ongoing field of labor for half a century. But the intersections between philosophy and climate change are more wide-ranging – as the emerging research fields of climate and natural philosophy in recent years testifies to. For instance, climate science raises questions of what we can know and accurately predict about the future due to increasingly sophisticated scientific methods, such as measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, analyses of satellite imagery, and climate modelling. In turn, epistemological as well as ethical considerations presuppose agents, relations, and domains, inviting ontological enquiry. Furthermore, historical philosophical traditions – such as philosophical romanticism – can offer tools that can criticize or develop necessary conceptual frameworks on the relation between the human and the non-human. 

Each talk will be given a 10-minutes timeslot for presentation, which will, subsequently, be discussed in plenum (20 minutes in total). Thomas Schwarz Wentzter as well as two of the invited speakers at the conference, Alejandra Mancilla (University of Oslo) and Anna Leuschner (University of Wuppertal) will participate in the seminar and comment on the presentations in the joint discussions.

Aim:

PhD-students are offered the opportunity to strengthen their presentation techniques in conference-like circumstances and, through joint discussions with international renowned scholars from the research area of environmental philosophy, improve their scientific work.

Literature:

Mancilla, Alejandra (2022). ”From Sovereignty to Guardianship in Ecoregions”. In: Journal of Applied Philosophy.
 
Leuschner, Anna (2015). “Uncertainties, Plurality, and Robustness in Climate Research and Modeling: On the Reliability of Climate Prognoses”. Journal for General Philosophy of Science (Vol. 46): 367–381.

Target group:

PhD-students and early career scholars (post-docs). 

Form:

Seminar with presentations and joint discussion.

Lecturers:

Anna Leuschner  
Alejandra Mancilla
Thomas Schwarz Wentzer 

Course dates:

• 14 September 2022 09:00 - 16:30