PHIL2444 · Philosophy

The Vegetative Soul: The Hidden Life of Plants

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

By weight, more than 80% percent of the living things on the earth are plants, and without them the earth's animals, including humans, would perish within weeks. But philosophy has spent a vanishingly small part of its efforts in considering this form of life, generally relegating plants to the status of minimally alive, but essentially uninteresting. As Michael Pollan notes, "plants are so unlike people that it's very difficult for us to appreciate fully their complexity and sophistication. Yet plants have been evolving much, much longer than we have, have been inventing new strategies for survival and perfecting their designs for so long that to say that one of us is the more 'advanced' really depends on how you define that term, and what 'advances' you value'." This class will consider how humans have historically regarded the plant kingdom, what we can learn from the challenging imaginary exercise of attempting to understand how they live, and how we might reconsider the world if we came to regard the plant kingdom not as passive subjects of human actions, but as powerful and vital actors in their own right.