The Road to Extinction: Philosophy, Climate Change and the Anthropocene
Facilitator: Charlie Blake
10-week course on Saturdays from 12pm to 2pm from 16 May to 18 July
(note there will be a two week break in the middle so 8 online classroom sessions)
Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, this course will be taught online. See below for how to register.
We are living through a tumultuous period of human history. A period in which, not only is our own species, home sapiens sapiens, under threat from massive changes to our planetary climate systems, but many other species of plant and animal with which we currently share this world are also facing possible or likely or even certain extinction as a consequence of our unthinking ecological interventions, global plundering of fossil fuels and other resources.
There are clearly political, social, economic, creative and personal dimensions to our responses this crisis as demonstrated by the rise of Extinction Rebellion and similar modal and molecular activisms, films, games, fictions and artworks in the past few years, but responses are far from uniform or coordinated. By way of coordination, this module will attempt to explore the specifically philosophical dimension of this rolling crisis through consideration of various ideas of world, planet, Earth, Cosmos, life and death, geometry, topology, technology, cognition, reflection and control from Aristotle and Epicurus through Leibniz, Spinoza and Kant and the Romantics to the more recent thinking of Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Michel Serres, James Lovelock, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and various thinkers of the anthropocene, the posthuman, the transhuman, the non-human and the ahuman.
Should we attempt to save and preserve our present ecology through some form of massively coordinated geoengineering project or even attempt the terraforming of other worlds, as some Silicon Valley libertarians suggest? Or alter the human itself to adjust to new environmental conditions or even replace the human with machine intelligences? Or perhaps learn how to grieve in advance for the end of our species and accept that it is now time for us to depart and to allow other species to take our place as some deep green ecologists and Gaia theorists argue?
In this module, over eight teaching weeks (with a two week break in between), we will be looking at the origins of ideas of the human and the natural in the Western philosophical tradition (though with reference to non-Western traditions also) and the speculative philosophical thinking that seeks to find a way beyond our current malaise.
To register for this module, sign up to our online learning platform, Ryver – instructions here.
Here are the steps:
- Register for a Ryver account
- Login and find the course forum you want to join
- Click on that forum and you’re registered
- The tutor will create the course forum at least a week before the course starts and post a link to Zoom so you can attend the online classes.