Knowing Life
The Ethics of Multispecies Epistemologies
1st Edition
Published on 28. February 2025
Book
Hardback
348 pages
978-1-032-65996-1 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Postgraduate
Illustrations
36 s/w Abbildungen, 36 s/w Photographien bzw. Rasterbilder
36 Halftones, black and white; 36 Illustrations, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 24 mm
Weight
710 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-032-65996-1 (9781032659961)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Knowing Life
The Ethics of Multispecies Epistemologies
Book
03/2025
1st Edition
Routledge
€70.30
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E-Book
02/2025
1st Edition
Routledge
€0.00
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E-Book
02/2025
1st Edition
Routledge
€0.00
Available for download
Person
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.
Content
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. Fa?r al-Din al-Razi's 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 Anzaldua