Environmental Philosophy

Volume 17, Issue 1, Spring 2020

Climate Change and the Task of Thinking

Is There Something Wrong With the Task of Thinking?

One way to approach the widely acknowledged failure to act on climate change would be to turn to the philosophical tradition, going back to Kant at least, that diagnoses all the internal impediments to thinking. It is with Heidegger, however, that thinking is curiously divided between a disclosure of the world, and the world’s occlusion. Rather than pursue Heidegger’s project of destroying throught’s accretions and returning to the world I will argue that it is the very concept of ‘thinking’ in the grand sense that needs to be destroyed if we are to be open to the future.