Knowing Life examines the limits of dominant knowledge forms that contribute to current practices negatively affecting more-than-human beings, while also exploring alternative approaches to knowing that are capable of reducing harm and maximizing planetary thriving.
Knowing Life examines the limits of dominant knowledge forms that contribute to current practices negatively affecting more-than-human beings, while also exploring alternative approaches to knowing that are capable of reducing harm and maximizing planetary thriving.
Specifically, this volume seeks multispecies answers to long-standing questions in Western philosophy: Who or what counts as a knower? What kinds of knowing are valid? Is knowledge a product of mind, body, or something else? Historically, these epistemic questions have been answered in ways that neutralize the knowing and knowledge contribution of and for more-than-human beings, as well as those on the margins of society considered less than “human.” Consequently, these epistemic assumptions often support the destruction of ecological habitats, industrialization of food animals, widespread use of insect and plant toxins, water and air pollution, climate extinctions, ecological militarism, and the perpetual flow of living beings used for entertainment, research, clothing, companionship, and economic resources.
In this book, crosscultural and multidisciplinary contributors—including lesser-known global religious-philosophical accounts, philosophies of plant and insect life, race and disability studies, laboratory epistemology, embodied semiotics, and scholar-artists—challenge and expand these classical concepts through diverse modes of embodied engagement on multispecies knowing toward open futures of planetary co-flourishing.
Introduction: From the Limits of Intelligibility to Perceptive
Rearrangements SECTION I: LIVING CONCEPTS Praxis A: Threshold Concepts for
Multispecies Communication
1. Precursor to Knowledge: Semiosis as Ground of
Multispecies Morality
2. Weaving Life and Death Back Together: On
Multispecies Mortality
3. Voracious Secularism: Emotional Habitus and the
Desire for Knowledge in Animal Experimentation
4. Synchronicities of the
Living and the Non-Living
5. Environmental Ethics, Climate Change, and
African Social Epistemology SECTION II: GROWING PERCEPTIONS Praxis B: The
Obligations of Our Ecological Relations: A Challenge for Land Acknowledgments
6. Decolonizing Listening: From Grammars of Lo Inaudito to Expansive
Onto-Epistemic Thresholds
7. Tree of Life-Death: On the Vegetal Wisdom of
Life in the Book of Zohar
8. Expansive Modes of Multispecies Knowing toward
Nonviolence in the Early Jain Canon
9. Multispecies Kinship and Kindness:
Knowing Life through Animist Etiquette and Ethics SECTION III: FREEING
SUBJECTIVITIES Praxis C: Knowing Animals in the Anthropocene through Animal
Photojournalism
10. Animals, Sex, and Gender: Understanding Animals in Animal
Welfare Practice
11. Unknown Patterns of Intersubjectivity: Zhuangzi, the
Seabird and the Happy Fish
12. Genre of the Animal: Beyond Racial Capitalist
Consumption
13. The Forbidden Turn: Decentering Modern Subjectivity by
Integrating Animal and Mystic Affects
14. Far al-Dn al-Rzs Multispecies
Epistemology SECTION IV: EXPERIMENTAL RESPONSES Praxis D: Making Music with
Mysterious Species in Ponds
15. A Multispecies Cosmovision: Knowing Nonhumans
Beyond the Cognitive Imaginary in Buddhist Thought and Practice
16. Love as a
Moral Method: Developing Attentive Platonic Love toward Nonhuman Animals
17. Transspecies Selves: Rethinking Species Being and the Boundaries of the
Human
18. Knowing Multiply, Unexpectedly, Imaginatively: Decolonizing
Knowledge with Gloria Anzaldúa
Brianne Donaldson is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Philosophy and Shri Parshvanath Presidential Chair in Jain Studies at the University of California, Irvine, USA. She is the author of Creaturely Cosmologies: Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Liberation, co-author of Insistent Life: Principles for Bioethics in the Jain Tradition, editor of Beyond the Bifurcation of Nature: A Common World for Animals and the Environment, and co-editor of The Future of Meat Without Animals, and Feeling Animal Death: Being Host to Ghosts.
Lisainfo e-raamatute kohta