Spring 2022: Honors Seminar: Global Political Philosophy: Climate Change, Catastrophe, and Just Futures

PHL 290 Honors Seminar: Global Political Philosophy:

Climate Change, Catastrophe, and Just Futures

Spring 2022

F2F, Thursdays 2:00-4:50 PM, Des Plaines Campus

Instructor: Patrick O’Donnell (podonnell@oakton.edu)

The possibility of the total collapse of human civilizations has rarely been so near and so imaginable as to contemporary dwellers of the Anthropocene. The threat of ecological catastrophe captured in terms such as “climate change” and “global warming” simultaneously looms on our temporal horizon and is in some sense already here, intertwined with practically every facet of human existence across the globe. This course is organized around two families of questions: First, what does climate change have to do with global justice, and particularly political struggles concerning categories such as citizenship, sovereignty, class, gender, and race? And second, how should we conceptualize the problem of climate change, and what sorts of concepts and communities will we need to foster if we are to alleviate or avoid the sort of catastrophic suffering that climate change threatens? Our approach will be primarily rooted in philosophical inquiry, but it will also be richly interdisciplinary. Students from a wide range of areas of academic focus are welcome.