The metaphysics of the anthropocene. World and Earth in Times of Climate Change

Since the emergence of the Anthropocene in scientific and philosophical debates, a discussion has been going on about the nature of this new phenomenon. Earth system sciences consider the impact of climate change in terms of a new geological epoch, in which humans have become the most crucial factor determining the appearance of the Earth. According to geologist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, the Anthropocene follows the Holocene (the warm period of the past 10–12 millennia) as an epoch in which humans have profoundly changed the geological conditions and processes that determine the carrying capacity of planet Earth, for instance, by anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions. This entry adopts a philosophical perspective to examine the metaphysics of the Anthropocene as a particular constellation of the World in Earth history. The entry is composed of several earlier contributions in the area of philosophy of technology and the Anthropocene (Blok 2017), the dimensions of World and Earth as theoretical notions to concep tualize the metaphysical structure of the Anthropocene World as it is embedded in Earth history (Blok 2023a), that can inform an geoethics beyond the ideal of the enmeshment of human and nonhuman beings in the ecosystems of planet Earth, as is proposed by posthumanists (Blok 2021).