The aim of this chapter is to examine the relevant philosophical accounts of climate anxiety and to provide a comprehensive overview of the existing literature on the subject. This will be done by outlining the three main philosophical approaches to climate anxiety. First will be considered the scholars who have put forward their own original theories or definitions of climate anxiety. These are philosophers such as Albrecht, who has developed an entirely new classificatory scheme of Earth-relat…
Read moreThe aim of this chapter is to examine the relevant philosophical accounts of climate anxiety and to provide a comprehensive overview of the existing literature on the subject. This will be done by outlining the three main philosophical approaches to climate anxiety. First will be considered the scholars who have put forward their own original theories or definitions of climate anxiety. These are philosophers such as Albrecht, who has developed an entirely new classificatory scheme of Earth-related emotions, or scholars like Smith, or McGrath, who look at climate anxiety through a cultural-historical lens. The second group consists of authors who analyze climate anxiety through the interpretive framework of Christian existential philosophy, mostly working with Tillich’s definition of anxiety. However, some of them also borrow concepts from other existential thinkers, most notably from Kierkegaard. The final, third group is made up of scholars who take a phenomenological approach to analyzing climate anxiety, using the methodological framework provided by philosophers such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. After outlining these three main philosophical approaches to climate anxiety, the chapter offers a brief discussion of the findings, which is followed by a definition of climate anxiety that is derived from these findings and from the two comprehensive taxonomies of climate emotions developed by Landmann and Pihkala.
