Awards

• Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2021 (UK)

Overview

**Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2021** Coping with the climate crisis is the greatest challenge we face as a species. We know the main task is to reduce our emissions as rapidly as possible to minimise the harm to the world’s population now and for generations to come. What on earth can philosophy offer us? In this compelling account of a problem we think we know inside out, the philosopher Graham Parkes outlines the climatic predicament we are in and how we got here, and explains how we can think about it anew by considering the relevant history, science, economics, politics and, for the first time, the philosophies underpinning them. Introducing the reality of global warming and its increasingly dire consequences, he identifies the immediate obstructions to coping with the problem, outlines the libertarian ideology behind them and shows how they can be circumvented. Drawing on the wisdom of the ancients in both the East-Asian and Western traditions (as embodied in such figures as Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Dogen, Plato, Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius and Nietzsche), Parkes shows how a greater awareness of non-Western philosophies, and especially the Confucian political philosophy advocated by China, can help us deal effectively with climate change and thrive in a greener future. If some dominant Western philosophical ideas and their instantiation in politics and modern technology got us into our current crisis, Parkes demonstrates persuasively that expanding our philosophical horizons will surely help get us out.

Full Product Details

9781350158863

Table of Contents

Reviews

An extremely well-written and passionate argument for action on climate change. Importantly, Parkes directly addresses the China question, and goes beyond the political, philosophical, and moral Eurocentrism that characterizes much of the current debate. * Hans Georg Moeller, Professor of Philosophy, University of Macau, China *

Author Information

Graham Parkes is Professorial Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria. For over thirty years he has taught environmental philosophies and Asian and comparative thought at UC Santa Cruz, the University of Hawaii, and universities in China, Japan, and Europe. He is the editor of Nietzsche and Asian Thought (1991) and author of Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche's Psychology (1994).

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