Plant-Thinking

A Philosophy of Vegetal Life

Michael Marder. Foreword by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala

Columbia University Press

The margins of philosophy are populated by non-human, non-animal living beings, including plants. While contemporary philosophers tend to refrain from raising ontological and ethical concerns with vegetal life, Michael Marder puts this life at the forefront of the current deconstruction of metaphysics. He identifies the existential features of plant behavior and the vegetal heritage of human thought so as to affirm the potential of vegetation to resist the logic of totalization and to exceed the narrow confines of instrumentality. Reconstructing the life of plants "after metaphysics," Marder focuses on their unique temporality, freedom, and material knowledge or wisdom. In his formulation, "plant-thinking" is the non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants, as much as the process of bringing human thought itself back to its roots and rendering it plantlike.

A superbly presented seminal work.... Highly recommended. Midwest Book Review

Profoundly original Choice

We owe Marder...a great debt for widening the contemporary philosophical discussion of life and ethics, taking it into the plant kingdom. Jeffrey T. Nealon, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Michael Marder's book Plant-Thinking is a timely contribution to the project of expanding ethical considerations to non-human beings.... This is a strong contribution to the post-metaphysical project. Canadian Philosophical Review

Life-changing Bangalore Review

Anyone can find something of note or amusement here. Publishers Weekly

Foreword by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala
Acknowledgments
Introduction: To Encounter the Plants . . .
Part I. Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics
1. The Soul of the Plant
2. The Body of the Plant
Part II. Vegetal Existentiality
3. The Time of Plants
4. The Freedom of Plants
5. The Wisdom of Plants
Epilogue: The Ethical Offshoots of Plant-Thinking
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Read the introduction to Plant-Thinking (to view in full screen, click on icon in bottom right-hand corner)

Short-listed, 2015 John N. Findlay Book Prize in Metaphysics

About the Author

Santiago Zabala (PhD, Philosophy, Pontifical Lateran University) is ICREA Research Professor and Director of the Vattimo Archive at Pompeu Fabra University. He is the author of a number of books, including Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (Columbia, 2017) and (with Gianni Vattimo) Hermeneutic Communism (Columbia, 2011).

Plant-Thinking

About the Author

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