The Philosophy of Environmental Emotions

This volume presents new philosophical perspectives on environmental emotions. It explores the motivating nature of emotions such as anger, grief, and hope in relation to the current climate crisis.

Many of our emotional responses to the climate crisis take a distressed form like anxiety, despair, or grief. However, these emotions almost always coexist with hope, a drive toward action, or a strengthened sense of relationality and belonging. This book explores the different levels at which these tensions take place. Part I discusses the conceptual and linguistic notions we use to make sense of our ecological predicament. Part II looks at the embedded dimension of our emotions: how we feel about the climate crisis as members of our communities and how our emotions are interconnected with what we do and how we work in and for our communities. Several chapters in this section explicitly discuss hope. Finally, Part III has a phenomenological and existential focus: it explores the nature of the rootedness and how it shapes our emotional experiences during the climate crisis.

The Philosophy of Environmental Emotions will appeal to scholars and graduate students working in environmental philosophy, philosophy of emotion, and environmental psychology.

Ondřej Beran is Associate Professor of Philosophy and one of the Heads of Research at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value (Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies), University of Pardubice. His recent publications include Examples and Their Role in Our Thinking (Routledge 2021).

Laura Candiotto is Associate Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value (Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies), University of Pardubice. Among her recent publications is “What I cannot do without you” (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 2022).

Niklas Forsberg is Associate Professor of Philosophy and one of the Heads of Research at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value (Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies), University of Pardubice. His recent publications include Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary (Routledge, 2021).

Antony Fredriksson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and one of the Heads of Research at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value (Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies), University of Pardubice. His recent publications include A Phenomenology of Attention and the Unfamiliar (Palgrave, 2022).

David Rozen is a PhD candidate and an external Lecturer of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Pardubice. Among his recent publications is “Attitudes Toward Nature as a Key for Understanding the Current Lack of Adequate Environmental Behavior: Overstepping the Dialectic of Extractivism and Romanticism” (Ethics, Policy & Environment, 2024).