Category: Biology/Ecology

Moss is as unlikely to fascinate philosophers as, say, cockroaches or dust. But if we scratch the surface of that indifference, something else entirely seems to be hiding just beneath it. Each in his own way, Francis Bacon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche tell us one and the same thing: moss is inassimilable to metaphysics. Condensing in miniature the entire kingdom Plantae, these tiny plants comprising approximately 14,000 species throw a formidable challenge to thinking based on oppositions, to linear chronologies, and to conventional theorizations of energy. From the outside, they support projects that aim to revolutionize philosophy, to convert philosophy back to life from its obsession with death. Seen through a child’s eyes, moss becomes as cognitively fresh and refreshing as it is vividly, dazzlingly green.

Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Vitoria-Gasteiz. His work spans the fields of environmental philosophy and ecological thought, political theory, and phenomenology. He is the author of many books and countless academic articles that engage with a critique of anthropocentrism in philosophy accounting for non-human types of existence especially with respect to the ontology of plants and their modes of being. His most recent publications include: Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); “The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium” (2014); “Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze” (2015); “Dust” (2016); “Grafts” (2016); with Luce Irigaray, “Through Vegetal Being” with Luce Irigaray (2016); and “Energy Dreams: Of Actuality” (2017), Political Categories: Thinking beyond Concepts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019)