Course Syllabus

Environmental Philosophy

Summer 2017

Session: Summer 1

Credits: 3

Program: European Humanities

Disciplines: Philosophy, Sustainability, Environmental Studies

Instructor: David Possen, dpo@dis.dk, V7-37

Meetings: Monday through Friday; see detailed schedule below

Classroom: F24-402

 

 

Course Description

To understand the current climate crisis is to ask the question of man’s responsibility towards nature. In Environmental Philosophy, we explore this question through critical study of the philosophical tradition, introducing a distinctively Scandinavian outlook on environmental challenges and sustainability. To deepen this local outlook, we embark on field trips across Denmark's eastern island of Zealand. Here we examine firsthand how Danes act on their sense of responsibility for humanity’s impact on the environment.

While our classroom work delves deep into classic works of European philosophy, we relate our findings continually to current discussions of sustainability and to the ethical implications of our modern-day lifestyle. This contemporary focus is reflected in our two Summer 2017 field study destinations: a sustainable and self-sustaining farming commune in Western Zealand; and an integrated wind farm, harbor, and coastal nature reserve system in the Eastern Zealand towns of Køge Bay. Guest lectures from Denmark’s community of environmentalist thinkers and historians of ideas further highlight the importance and contemporary relevance of our inquiry. 

 

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, you will be able to 

• identify the major beliefs, commitments, and ideologies at play in current environmental policy debates, and thus be able to see through and behind mere slogans;
• perceive how common policy arguments and positions fit into the broad historical arc of environmental thinking — and appreciate the centrality of the anthropocentrism debate to this arc;
• articulate your own views on core environmental policy questions with clarity and a sense of how they fit into the existing tradition and debate;
• understand the distinctive role that Scandinavian thinkers and societies have played in the global environmental movement’s recent history.

To understand the current climate crisis is to ask the question of man’s responsibility towards nature.  In this philosophy course, we work with this question through a critical study of the philosophical tradition, providing a Scandinavian perspective on environmental issues and sustainability in relation to the philosophical discourse, and relating these findings to current discussions of sustainability and the ethical implications of our modern day lifestyle.

Environmental Philosophy at DIS is composed of four modules.  In Module 1, we explore the environmental movement’s philosophical underpinnings.  Here we confront several of the core questions that today’s environmentalists must urgently resolve, such as: “How do we balance our own needs against those of future human generations?”  “What is truly in the best interests of other species, and of the biosphere as a whole?” 

In Module 2, we turn to America, birthplace of the modern environmental movement.  Following a tour of the American tradition of philosophical environmentalism—from Thoreau to Rachel Carson—we consider several live flashpoints in American environmental policy, such as the troubling legacy of interaction between conservationism and racism, and the policy implications of radical animal rights activism.

This grounding in American environmental philosophy equips us to devote the rest of the course to a closer look at European environmental thought.  Module 3 examines what major thinkers of the continental tradition—including Spinoza, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer—teach about our place in the natural world and our responsibilities toward it.  The centerpiece of this module is Heidegger’s essay The Question Concerning Technology, the foundational text of twentieth-century European environmentalism.

In Module 4, finally, we scrutinize the specifically Scandinavian and 21^st-century perspective on sustainability and ecological health set forth by the influential “deep ecology” movement.  We end with a course-wide debate on the merits, viability, and future of Scandinavian deep ecology against the backdrop of both the European and American traditions of environmental philosophy.

 

DIS Contacts

Matt Kelley, Program Assistant, European Humanities mk@dis.dk

 

 

Course Requirements and Grade Components

Our readings are short and pithy.  Students are expected to come to class ready to discuss and debate them in detail.  While on field studies, students are expected to take active part by asking questions and taking mental notes for later reference.  Students are graded on this participation.  The participation mark makes up 20% of the final grade.

The first writing assignment is a two-page response paper due at the end of Week 1, and pertaining to Module 1.  The response paper is graded pass/fail; among its uses is to generate personalized advice on the final paper (see below) to be written at the end of term. The pass/fail mark on the response paper accounts for 10% of the final grade.

An group take-home, open-book midterm at the close of Module 2 is designed to ensure that every student has acquired a sufficiently deep familiarity with the American tradition of philosophical environmentalism to flourish in Modules 3 and 4.  The midterm is conducted in the second half of Week 2 and the beginning of Week 3.  It contributes 25% of the final grade.

Following Module 3, students are expected to write a term paper of medium length (6-8 pp.) on a topic inspired by our readings in Continental environmental philosophy.  This paper contributes 35% of the final course grade.

The remaining 10% of the final grade is based on students’ preparation and performance in the course-wide debate on deep ecology, which is held each semester on the last day of class.

 

Disability and Resource Statement

Any student who has a need for accommodation based on the impact of a disability should immediately contact Office of Academic Support (acadsupp@dis.dk) to coordinate this. In order to receive accommodations, students should inform the instructor of approved DIS accommodations.

 

Readings

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations,” in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Richard B. Howarth, eds., Perspectives on Climate Change: Science, Economics, Politics, Ethics (Burlington: Emerald Group Publishing, 2005), pp. 221-253.  IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

Derek Parfit, “Energy Policy and the Further Future: The Identity Problem,” in Douglas Maclean and Peter G. Brown, eds., Energy and the Future (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983): 166–179.  IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

Stephen M. Gardiner, “A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics, and the Problem of Moral Corruption,” Environmental Values 15 (2006), pp. 397-413.   IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

Bjørn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 328-342.  IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

Jonathan Ledgard, “Bjorn Lomborg is the World’s Most Optimistic Statistician,” Strategy + Business 38 (Spring 2005) [http://www.strategy-business.com/article/05108].  ON CANVAS.

Mark Lynas, “Natural Bjorn Killer,” The Ecologist, 33:2 (March 2003), pp. 26-29.   ON CANVAS.

Arne Næss, “The Deep Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects,” in Philosophical Inquiry 8:1-2 (1986), pp. 10-31.  IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” The Atlantic Monthly 9:56 (1862), pp. 657-674.  IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

John Muir, “A Near View of the High Sierra,” in The Mountains of California (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books), pp. 38-58.  ONLINE.

Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic,” in A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Ballantine Books [Oxford University Press], 1986 [1949]), pp. 237-263.  IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962), pp. 3-12, 70-83.  IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

Robert D. Bullard, “Neighborhoods ‘Zoned’ for Garbage,” in Bullard, The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2005), pp. 43-61.  IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

Susan L. Cutter, “Race, class, and environmental justice,” Progress in Human Geography 19:1 (1995), pp. 111-122.  IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

Peter Singer, “All Animals Are Equal,” in Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins, 2009 [1975]), pp. 1-24.  IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, ed. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1-22.  IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

OPTIONAL reading: Arne Næss, Life’s Philosophy: Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World, tr. Roland Huntford (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002), pp. 92-116.  IN COURSE COMPENDIUM

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 167-182 (§§109-125).  IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Basis of Morals,” in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, tr. Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 219-235 (§19).  ON CANVAS.

Søren Kierkegaard, “The Care of Self-Torment,” in Christian Discourses, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 70-80.  IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” trans. William Lovitt, in Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 3-35.   IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, tr. Hans Jonas and David Herr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 1-24.  IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

Arne Næss, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle, tr. David Rothenburg  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 163-183, 193-212.  IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

Warwick Fox, “Transpersonal Ecology: ‘Psychologizing Ecophilosophy,’” The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 22 (1990) 1: 59-76, 89-94.   IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity  (New York: Basic Books, 2006), pp. 135-145.   IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.

Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order, tr. Carol Volk (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 59-90.  IN COURSE COMPENDIUM.