Description:
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.
Brief description: 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).
Review Quotes: A superbly presented seminal work.... Highly recommended.--Midwest Book Review