ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors offer an account of fear and risk in anticipation of catastrophe. They draw on the narrative response to the Mount Etna volcano to frame an evaluation of how fear can be seen to impact the understanding of risk when the event of that risk is the catastrophic suffering of an entire community. The authors’ approach is from the field of philosophy: they provide a contemporary conceptual analysis of the nature and value of both fear and risk in this context in order to consider the extent they play in societal responses to natural disasters in particular and to threatening possibilities generally. The cognitive model of emotion offers uniquely rich epistemic and educational benefits to analyses of people’s emotions and the emotions of historical populations. The philosophy of fear aims to articulate what fear is and does: what distinguishes it from other emotions, and how it operates in our lives.
