The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture

ISBN-13: 9781509531523 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 176 str.

Emanuele Coccia

Opis

We barely talk about them and seldom know their names. Philosophy has always overlooked them; even biology considers them as mere decoration on the tree of life. And yet plants give life to the Earth: they produce the atmosphere that surrounds us and they are the origin of the oxygen that animates us.

Recenzje

"Back to animals! Back to mushrooms! And now back to plants! It is with plants that this marvellous, witty, and immensely literate book wants us, the human readers, to get acquainted again. And, of course, with plants it is actually toward the sun that we are reoriented. Philosophy is on the move again, not exactly forward but downward, giving a completely different meaning to what counts as a foundation to thought."Bruno Latour"The view of life as interdependence is a particularly affecting and relevant way to think about living and coping in the Anthropocene, when the ways that humans affect the literal composition of the atmosphere has become the existential question of our time."The Nation

Spis treści

• Acknowledgments
• I. Prologue
• 1. On Plants, or the Origin of Our World
• 2. The Extension of the Domain of Life
• 3. On Plants, or the Life of the Spirit
• 4. Toward a Philosophy of Nature
• II. Leaf Theory: The Atmosphere of the World
• 5. Leaves
• 6. Tiktaalik roseae
• 7. In Open Air: Ontology of the Atmosphere
• 8. The Breath of the World
• 9. Everything is in Everything
• III. Theory of the Root: The Life of the Stars
• 10. Roots
• 11. The Deepest are the Stars
• IV. Theory of the Flower: The Reason of Forms
• 12. Flowers
• 13. Reason is Sex
• V. Epilogue
• 14. On Speculative Autotrophy
• 15. Like an Atmosphere
• Notes

O autorze

Emanuele Coccia is an Associate Professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris. He is the author of Sensible Life and (with Donatien Grau) The Transitory Museum.