Kierkegaard and Climate Catastrophe

Kierkegaard and Climate Catastrophe PDF Author: Isak Winkel Holm
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192676741
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Søren Kierkegaard's work is teeming with images of earthquakes, floods, storms, volcanic eruptions, wildfires, burned down cities, and apocalyptic events that 'let the heavens fall and the stars change their places in the overturning of everything'. These disaster images are not just rhetorical packaging of the philosophical and theological content of his works. Rather, disasters play an important but largely understudied role in Kierkegaard's analysis of human existence. Kierkegaard and Climate Catastrophe focuses on prophetic noir in Kierkegaard's work: the sombre mood that is evoked when the shadow of future disaster falls upon the present. Isak Winkel Holm's core contention is that the prophetic noir in Kierkegaard, modelled after the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, contributes to making his works urgently relevant today. From the vantage point of the contemporary world threatened by rapidly evolving climate catastrophes, Kierkegaard's analysis of human existence emerges in a more sombre light, dimmed by the future disaster: to exist, in the emphatic sense Kierkegaard gave to that word, is to live a meaningful human life even if things are darkened by the coming calamity. Thus, a thorough analysis of the prophetic noir in Kierkegaard offers an existential perspective on living in a world threatened by environmental devastation.

Søren Kierkegaard and Climate Catastrophe

Søren Kierkegaard and Climate Catastrophe PDF Author: Isak Winkel Holm
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192862510
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Søren Kierkegaard's work is teeming with images of earthquakes, floods, storms, volcanic eruptions, wildfires, burned down cities, and apocalyptic events that 'let the heavens fall and the stars change their places in the overturning of everything'. These disaster images are not just rhetorical packaging of the philosophical and theological content of his works. Rather, disasters play an important but largely understudied role in Kierkegaard's analysis of human existence. Kierkegaard and Climate Catastrophe focuses on prophetic noir in Kierkegaard's work: the sombre mood that is evoked when the shadow of future disaster falls upon the present. Isak Winkel Holm's core contention is that the prophetic noir in Kierkegaard, modelled after the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, contributes to making his works urgently relevant today. From the vantage point of the contemporary world threatened by rapidly evolving climate catastrophes, Kierkegaard's analysis of human existence emerges in a more sombre light, dimmed by the future disaster: to exist, in the emphatic sense Kierkegaard gave to that word, is to live a meaningful human life even if things are darkened by the coming calamity. Thus, a thorough analysis of the prophetic noir in Kierkegaard offers an existential perspective on living in a world threatened by environmental devastation.

Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith

Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith PDF Author: Philip Jenkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197506216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
"[The author] draws out the complex relationship between religion and climate change. He shows that the religious movements and ideas that emerge from climate shocks often last for many decades, and become a familiar part of the religious landscape, even though their origins in particular moments of crisis may be increasingly consigned to remote memory" -- From jacket flap.

Climate Change as Political Catastrophe

Climate Change as Political Catastrophe PDF Author: Ross Mittiga
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192695401
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
There is now clear scientific consensus that, without immediate and decisive action, the world risks climate catastrophe. This has fueled climate emergency declarations among activist groups and, increasingly, among local, state, and supranational governments. But what exactly counts as a "climate catastrophe" and what does catastrophic climate change portend for contemporary societies? This book argues that climate change is politically catastrophic insofar as it threatens to undermine the material conditions that make justice - and by extension stable democratic government - possible. It then uses the lens of catastrophe to bring into focus pressing questions concerning how to navigate trade-offs between fairness and precautionary efficacy in the design of climate policy, the permissibility of authoritarian climate emergency powers, and the nature and role of climate disobedience. Apart perhaps from the spectre of nuclear annihilation, human civilization has never had to reckon with a threat so final and encompassing as that of climate catastrophe. Much as some have argued that "supreme necessity" alters the contours of what is permissible in war, this book starts from the premise that the credible threat of politically catastrophic climate change upends many of the most basic and widely shared assumptions in liberal and democratic thought.

Imperiled Life

Imperiled Life PDF Author: Javier Sethness
Publisher: AK Press
ISBN: 1849351066
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
Imperiled Life theorizes an exit from the potentially terminal consequences of capital-induced climate change. It is a collection of reflections on the phenomenon of catastrophe—climatological, political, social—as well as on the possibilities of overcoming disaster. Javier Sethness-Castro presents the grim news from contemporary climatologists while providing a reconstructive vision inspired by anarchist intellectual traditions and promoting critical thought as a means of changing our historical trajectory. Javier Sethness-Castro is a libertarian socialist and a rights advocate. Imperiled Life is his first book.

The Environmental Apocalypse

The Environmental Apocalypse PDF Author: Jakub Kowalewski
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000779874
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This volume brings together scholars working in diverse traditions of the humanities in order to offer a comprehensive analysis of the environmental catastrophe as the modern-day apocalypse. Drawing on philosophy, theology, history, literature, art history, psychoanalysis, as well as queer and decolonial theories, the authors included in this book expound the meaning of the climate apocalypse, reveal its presence in our everyday experiences, and examine its impact on our intellectual, imaginative, and moral practices. Importantly, the chapters show that eco-apocalypticism can inform progressively transformative discourses about climate change. In so doing, they demonstrate the fruitfulness of understanding the environmental catastrophe from within an apocalyptic framework, carving a much-needed path between two unsatisfactory approaches to the climate disaster: first, the conservative impulse to preserve the status quo responsible for today’s crisis, and second, the reckless acceptance of the destructive effects of climate change. This book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars interested in the contributions of both apocalypticism and the humanities to contemporary ecological debates.

Kierkegaard and the Life of Faith

Kierkegaard and the Life of Faith PDF Author: Jeffrey Hanson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253025028
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
“A thorough, considered, and provocative treatment of what justifiably remains Kierkegaard’s most famous book.” —Marginalia Review of Books Soren Kierkegaard’s masterful work Fear and Trembling interrogates the story of Abraham and Isaac, finding there one of the most profound and critical dilemmas in all of religious philosophy. While several commentaries and critical editions exist, Jeffrey Hanson offers a distinctive approach to this crucial text. Hanson gives equal weight to all three of Kierkegaard’s “problems,” dealing with Fear and Trembling as part of the entire corpus of Kierkegaard’s thought and putting all parts into relation with each other. Additionally, he offers a distinctive analysis of the Abraham story and other biblical texts, giving particular attention to questions of poetics, language, and philosophy, especially as each relates to the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Presented in a thoughtful and fresh manner, Hanson’s claims are original and edifying. This new reading of Kierkegaard will stimulate fruitful dialogue on well-traveled philosophical ground.

Storms of My Grandchildren

Storms of My Grandchildren PDF Author: James Hansen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608192571
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
An urgent and provocative call to action from the world's leading climate scientist-speaking out here for the first time with the full story of what we need to know about humanity's last chance to get off the path to a catastrophic global meltdown, and why we don't know the half of it. In Storms of My Grandchildren, Dr. James Hansen-the nation's leading scientist on climate issues-speaks out for the first time with the full truth about global warming: The planet is hurtling even more rapidly than previously acknowledged to a climatic point of no return. Although the threat of human-caused climate change is now widely recognized, politicians have failed to connect policy with the science, responding instead with ineffectual remedies dictated by special interests. Hansen shows why President Obama's solution, cap-and-trade, which Al Gore has signed on to, won't work; why we must phase out all coal, and why 350 ppm of carbon dioxide is a goal we must achieve if our children and grandchildren are to avoid global meltdown and the storms of the book's title. This urgent manifesto bucks conventional wisdom(including the Kyoto Protocol) and is sure to stir controversy, but Hansen-whose climate predictions have come to pass again and again, beginning in the 1980s when he first warned Congress about global warming-is the single most credible voice on the subject worldwide. Hansen paints a devastating but all-too-realistic picture of what will happen in the near future, mere years and decades from now, if we follow the course we're on. But he is also an optimist, showing that there is still time to do what we need to save the planet. Urgent, strong action is needed, and this book will be key in setting the agenda going forward to create a groundswell, a tipping point, to save humanity-and our grandchildren-from a dire fate more imminent than we had supposed.

Kierkegaard and Possibility

Kierkegaard and Possibility PDF Author: Erin Plunkett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350299006
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
How does our conception of possibility contribute to our understanding of self and world? In what sense does the possible differ from the merely probable, and what would it mean to treat possibility as part of the real? This book is an opportunity to see Kierkegaard as contributing to a distinctive phenomenology, ontology, and psychology of possibility that addresses the question of our existential relationship to the possible. The term 'possibility' (Mulighed) and its variants occur with curious frequency across Kierkegaard's writings. Key to Kierkegaard's understanding of the self, possibility is linked to a number of core concepts in his works: from imagination, anxiety, despair, and 'the moment' to the idea in The Sickness Unto Death that “God is that all things are possible”. Responding to what he sees as a Hegelian and Aristotelian misunderstanding of possibility, Kierkegaard offers a novel reading of the possible that, in turn, directly influences 20th-century philosophers such as Heidegger, Deleuze, and Derrida. Kierkegaard gives a rich account of how anxiety and despair, as lived experiences of possibility, not only show us the contingency and fragility of the systems and identities we presently inhabit but also reveal a more fundamental contingency that demands a new way of relating to the possible. For Kierkegaard, hope, faith, and love are attitudes in which meaning is forged by embracing contingency. In a time of political, social, and environmental uncertainty Kierkegaard's work on radical possibility seems more relevant than ever.

The Ethos of the Climate Event

The Ethos of the Climate Event PDF Author: Kellan Anfinson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100033113X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
This book develops a politico-ethical response to climate change that accounts for the novelty and uncertainty that it entails. This volume explores the ethical dimensions of climate change and posits that one must view it as a social construction intimately tied to political issues in order to understand and overcome this environmental challenge. To show how this ethos builds upon the need for new forms of responsiveness, Anfinson analyzes it in terms of four features: commitment, worldly sensitivity, political disposition, and practice. Each of these features is developed by putting four thinkers – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Foucault respectively – in conversation with the literature on climate change. In doing so, this book shows how social habits and norms can be transformed through subjective thought and behavior in the context of a global environmental crisis. Presenting a multidisciplinary engagement with the politics, philosophy, and science of climate change, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, environmental politics, environmental philosophy and environmental humanities.