Some philosophers, such as Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil, have positioned love as a foundational moral emotion, capable of illuminating the reality of others. But what is "love"? I will explore the most classic Western definition of love – Platonic love, also termed "the quality view of love” – in the context of animal ethics. Can Plato’s understanding of love facilitate love of nonhuman animals, and ultimately their moral appreciation? I will argue that whilst Platonic love deepens the epistemic dimensions of love directed toward nonhuman animals, it faces three obstacles, which are idealization, generalism and expendability, and which are acutely relevant also in the context of contemporary love of animals. Fortunately, these obstacles can be avoided by revisiting Murdoch and Weil, and their definition of love as attention. In conclusion, I claim that one morally fruitful way to approach love of other animals is “attentive Platonic love”. Such love holds enormous potential for radically reshaping how human individuals and societies treat our nonhuman kin.

What would it mean to do justice to testimonies of traumatic experiences in contexts of colonial devastation? How to intervene in the frameworks of sense or “grammars” that determine in advance the conditions of audibility in the realm of memory-building without reiterating forms of epistemic violence in the attempt? How to listen to the memory of bodies, beings, and worlds whose existence exceeds, escapes, or resists the grammars of Anthropocentrism? How, then, to listen to their distinct voice before and beyond colonial audibility—that is, before and beyond the voice and the voicing effects of the colonial subject? In short, how to resist the coloniality of memory? This paper theorizes the call to create radical grammars to listen to traumatic/colonial memory otherwise by thinking through Marisol de la Cadena’s invitation to open sense, and the senses, to the “Anthropo-not-seen:” the world-making processes by which heterogeneous worlds come together while they divergently contravene the colonial, onto-epistemic division between humans and non-humans, between the Anthropos and all other “natural species.” A subversive and imaginative strategy against the erasure of colonial/traumatic violence, decolonial grammars of listening open onto-epistemic thresholds in which the memory of divergent worlding practices can be heard, recalled, and reclaimed as it rearranges the (un)common textures of the present.

The conversion to modernity silenced sensory perceptions and intuitions for re-presentational thinking; the species animal was muted and the selfless saint ghosted for the erection of the egoic human. Thus, the modern human is addicted to thinking. Yet, just as one cannot re-present sensory perception in words, so one cannot think affect. Nor can one name or follow a logic for intuition, as it is simultaneously too vast in gestation and uniquely particular in expression – just as one cannot re-see or re-say dreams. The immediacy in one’s affective sensorium and noetic intuition consistently escapes the most rigorous and vigilant of objective thinkers – as the subjective naming of an object is not the only mode of consciousness or knowing. In Sikhi one has to shift from ego-thinking to animal perception combined with saintly intuition – and in their re-integration witness a transformed, even evolved human. Any alternative epistemology then reduced to merely thinking cannot avoid manufacturing illusions – however useful they may be. This epistemic misdirection occurs primarily because, following Nietzsche, in modernity the animal and saint are dead, and we have killed them. That is to say, alternative modes of knowing have to engage, rather cultivate, alternative states of consciousness or ontological being, beyond merely thinking differently. There is not only knowing from a distance (science), or knowing by association (religion, sport, crafts), but also knowing via merger (mysticism, ‘yoga’). Only in the latter does the silence of the animal sensorium and the intuitive revelations of saintly transcendence of subject-object duality, can the human gain the potential to utterly unsettle and rewrite our understanding. Such an orientation reveals a co-dependent, inter-species understanding of our origination, that de-ontologises thinking towards our own living ahuman temporalities thus liberating our inner muted animal and ghosted saint.

I am certainly not the first to say that understanding our world requires an inclusive perceptiveness. Humans cannot know apart from their ecosystems, their tools, and the communities that give them language. Attending to all of these at once might be impossible, but I have already given up on pragmatism as an intellectual limit. This paper will build from my earlier work on transspecies epistemologies, and from years of research in The Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers at the University of Texas at Austin, to develop an inclusive methodology. Rather than pursuing a linear focus and a single-voiced argument, I will experiment with alternatives to conventional argumentation, including dialogue, juxtaposition, speculation, and a map of divergent angles on Anzaldúa criticism. This approach is inspired by recent decolonial work by Laura Elisa Pérez and Alexis Pauline Gumbs as well as my own recent forays into collage as a method. My hope is that this multidirectional approach and non-empirical aim will open doors to new kinds of ethical research practice.

Through this paper I address questions of sex/gender as a component in, but relatively under examined aspect of the practice of animal welfare. On one level, animal welfare is clearly structured by sex/gender, the dairy industry and egg industries are grounded on the appropriation of the reproductive capacities of female animals, and meat industries are structured in ways that shape the lives of male, female and intersex animals in different ways. There has been some critical work that has addressed these aspects, however, the focus for this paper is how understandings of human sex/gender, shape the lives of animals as they are articulated in welfare policy and practice and shape what it means to ‘fare-well’. Through the paper I use three examples, a giraffe, a drift of pigs and a population of bees to illustrate how normative assumptions of sex/gender influence the definition of a ‘good life’ but also how such assumptions come up against, are challenged or exceeded by animal sex/uality.

In this paper, I use the “onto-ethical-epistemology” lens of feminist physicist Karen Barad to consider knowledge practices in the earliest surviving text of the South Asian Jaina tradition. I argue that the Ācārāṅga-sūtra, or "Book of Conduct," likewise articulate the inseparability of being, knowing, and doing, which I identify through three multispecies knowledge practices: (1) analogical knowing, (2) reciprocal suffering, and (3) experimental restraints of carefulness. This proto "onto-ethical-epistemology" emerges as a counter to rival beliefs and practices that disappear and instrumentalize the more-than-human world and, moreover, provides a foundation for later systematic texts that detail the Jaina tradition's metaphysics and long-standing commitment to radical nonviolence toward all living beings. Viewed alongside Barad's own rebellion of "intra-action" against Newtonian mechanism and Descartes’ hard split between knowing subjects and passive known objects, the Ācārāṅga offers a resonant echo from antiquity demanding a more adequate account of and harm-reducing responsibility within multispecies world-making.

In political philosophy and theory both the figure of the human and its corollary, the non-human animal, share a proximity with the slave. While this is inaugurated in the annals of political philosophy with Aristotle’s categorization of man as a speaking and political animal and the slave as well as the foreigner as without reasoned speech, the status of the slave undergoes a historical torsion with the anti-black incarnation of the racial slave and Middle Passage modernity. The political grammar of the human as an ­­anti-black dispositif has been brilliantly deconstructed and radically upended by Frank Wilderson in his Afropessimist inflected writing, especially Red, White and Black (Duke UP, 2010) and in Saidiya Hartman’s phenomenal Scenes of Subjection (Oxford, 1997) where the slave is disclosed as the ground for the modern political subject. These Black radical interventions and cuts into political theory – at once penetrate and simultaneously remain in a fugitive relation to its philosophical edifice. I trace the presence of the figure of the animal in Marx, to discern how what Nicole Shukin terms “animal capitalism” always already inheres in Marx’s writing and analysis prior to the explosive growth of the factory farm, agribusiness, animal protectionism and carceral animal law. Taking a different approach, I consider how Marx theorizes capitalism as an animalizing violence that dispossesses the worker of humanity, as seen primarily in his early writings. I then turn again to Black radical thought and cinema, to consider the ways in which blackness, animality and the (lumpen)proletariat are put into relation in the films of Charles Burnett and how anti-blackness mediates anthropological taxonomy and affective life.

Multi-species relationships, including kinship and conflict, have gained considerable attention in diverse academic and popular arenas recently. Human exceptionalism and separatism are being challenged – especially as Indigenous knowledges are increasingly celebrated. One key impact of this ferment of activity is a deepening sense that “knowing” involves “doing”, that epistemology and ontology are braided together, and that ethical research involves and results in actions (recuperative or resistant). In this presentation I consider some of the efforts through which animists (self-identified or otherwise) experiment with etiquettes of inter-species kinship. In addition to more-or-less dramatic ceremonies of re-making a world after human-separatism, I am intrigued by the preparations some people make to meet other-than-human kin with hopes or expectations of mutual conversation and conviviality. I want to know if trees welcome huggers or if they’d rather be introduced first. Accepting the challenge presented by these animist experiments to (still) standard scholarly practices, I reflect on the encouragement of greater engagement by scholars who are also, inescapably and sensually, kin.

What is arguably characteristic of African conceptions of knowledge is a strongly relational element that is also found in African ontology and ethics. Coming to know is understood as a process of persons developing insights in relation with one another and with all that exists. This indicates not only an intimate relationship between knower and known, between what it is to know and what it is to be known, but in effect also a communalist understanding of knowledge: I know because we know. Or, a knower is a knower because of other knowers. How does this bear on environmental ethics and, especially, on the ongoing climate crisis? Simply and succinctly put, we are all in this together. Anthropogenic climate change is probably the most urgent problem facing humanity and its policy makers. While there has been little cause for optimism in recent decades, with rapid species extinction, melting polar ice caps and glaciers, rising ocean levels, and increasing incidence of bush and forest fires, floods, and life-threatening storms, two seismic sets of events have indicated that it may not be too late to avert the climate catastrophe. The outbreak of a new form of coronavirus and Russia’s war on the Ukraine have led to all kinds of realization and reconsideration, regarding human lifestyles. First, 75% of all infectious diseases are therionotic, that is, they originate in non-human animals. Second, the lockdowns following the outbreak and spread of COVID-19 had visible positive environmental consequences. Third, reliance on fossil fuels (like coal, oil, and gas imports from Russia) ought to give way to expansion of renewable energies. And finally, turning away from animal products is likely to yield substantial benefits – economic, environmental, and in terms of human (and animal) health and well-being.

In the words of Zimbabwean novelist Chenjerai Hove, Africans “have neither catalogued nature nor pinned it down and preserved it in formaldehyde. We see it differently and speak to and about it differently.” The present essay examines the validity of this statement and the contribution African indigenous knowledge systems are seen to make in response to global environmental problems and dilemmas.

I will survey a range of biological accounts of the synchronization of living processes with their non-living milieus, as a way of constructing a process philosophical account of ‘nature’ as we might understand it in today’s context of accelerated climate change. My analysis spans the evolutionary synchronicity of species with environment, as the biologist Julian Huxley contemplates in his reflections on the effects of geological shifts and the forces of ‘denudation’ exerted by the weather, by plants, and by animals. Such forces do not only exist for the benefit of individuals or species, participating as they do in the processes of natural selection towards extinction if the conditions are unfavourable. In this light, my paper shall also focus on reported disruptions of synchrony due to climate change, resulting in physiological changes that may or may not benefit different species. Finally, I compare these geological and evolutionary accounts with instances of the pathologized ‘rhythms’ of an individual’s interaction with its biological and social milieus, with reference to recent scholarship on Henri Bergson’s book, Laughter and studies of neurological conditions that disrupt motor function.

My aim in this piece is to complicate the conceptualization of human domination over nonhuman animals as “speciesism,” or the irrational preference of one’s own species over other species. This concept is fundamentally flawed in that it denies or erases the ways in which anti-Blackness, the phobic hatred of Blackness, systematically excludes Black people from the category of the “human.” I consider the question: can we develop an alternative to “speciesism” that does not purchase animal liberation at the expense of Black liberation, but instead sees the two struggles as complementary, mutually imbricated projects?

The separation of knowledge from life has long and far-reaching roots in the West. The Biblical tradition mentions two trees growing in the middle of the Garden of Eden, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:9), as well as God’s prohibition to eat the fruit of the latter tree. The original sin both results from and produces multiple splits and separations: of the forbidden fruit from the branch, on which it ripens; of fallen humanity from the place where the tree of life grows; and, ultimately, of knowledge from life itself. Henceforth, knowledge pertains to death, and it deadens everyone who is living by converting them into its objects. Outside the Edenic condition, knowledge and life become mutually exclusive. That is why attempts to recover a living knowledge, the knowledge of and for life as its source and destination, appear fanciful.

In other traditions, the cosmic tree often does not evince such a separation. In the Bhagavad Gītā, the eternal aśvattha tree is a tree at once of life and of knowledge. Resembling a fig or a banyan, it is imperishable (avyayaṁ), “having its roots above and branches below, / its leaves are the (Vedic) hymns. /” (XV.1). Immediately, though, aśvattha’s hierarchical arrangement is put in question: “Below and above [adhaścordhvaṁ] its branches spread, / nourished by the qualities, with objects of the senses as sprouts; / and below its roots stretch forth / engendering action in the world of men” (XV.2). The realms above and below merge into a single domain above-below, adhaścordhvaṁ, just as living and knowing, sensing-thinking and acting, are different parts of the same vegetal being.

The stark contrast between “Biblical” and “Eastern” worldviews grows more complicated as soon as one takes into account the mystical strands of Judaism, particularly the Book of Zohar, the centerpiece of the Jewish Kabbalah. Here, the tree of life, in the shape of the sefira tif’eret also associated with the Torah, continues to exert its influence on the world and, in turn, to be influenced by human actions. Indeed, the entire sefirotic tree of divine emanations (the Judaic version of the cosmic tree) is understood as a tree of life, suggesting a metonymic relation between a part (tif’eret / Torah) and the whole. And it is an appreciation of sefirotic tree in its unity that spells out the wisdom of Zohar, which is of a piece with life itself, as opposed to knowledge that separates, analyzes, and so deadens everything that is, including the lower parts of the sefirotic tree, detaching šeḵīnah from tif’eret.

In this essay, I will interpret the kabbalistic interpretation of the original sin in keeping with the possibility of “knowing life” that it opens. According to Zohar, God’s prohibition had to do not with the actual eating of fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but with eating (and, hence, with knowing) that disrespected the unity of existence. When Adam and Eve disobey this prohibition, they grasp the fruit of this tree, linked to the lowest divine emanation, šeḵīnah, apart from the rest and, in doing so, convert this tree into a tree of death. In line with the kabbalistic interpretation, I will consider two kinds of šeḵīnah’s emptiness: the welcoming withdrawal that receives the flows of divine emanations and life itself, on the one hand, and the void of death that engulf and nullifies all that is, on the other. I will then discuss the formal knowledge harboring the second kind of emptiness in terms of its separation of life from death in metaphysical attempt to purify life that achieves the opposite, deadening effect. The essay concludes with speculations on why the vegetal model of wisdom is celebrated by the Book of Zohar and how it is propitious to processes of “knowing life” otherwise within the framework of a major Western tradition.

We often assume that we know what we are reflecting on, when we think about living and dying. But for those who have learned to think in the wake of a western metaphysical tradition, our sense of what life and death are—in the first place—has been deeply shaped by history, culture, and politics. Western metaphysical thought has bequeathed to us a sharp and oppositional distinction between life and death. And Christian theology has amplified (even into secular contexts) the Apostle Paul’s famous claim that death is the “last enemy” to be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26). Death becomes a figure of the undesirable, perhaps even evil itself. It should come as no surprise, perhaps, that another charged distinction has been forged out of these oppositions: the line between humans and animals. Humans are superior to other animals, it has often been said, because humans understand death, and know what it is to die. Humans can appreciate being alive, so their lives of are value. Animals, in this view, simply perish. This makes them, as Heidegger put it, “poor in world” while humans are “world forming.”

In this paper I seek to disrupt and unsettle this sense of life and death through a multispecies epistemology of death. I challenge anthropomorphic epistemologies of death through the work of Susana Monsó, who argues that what she calls a “minimal concept of death” is not only present but is likely prevalent in more than human worlds. Death is, perhaps, both more simple and infinitely more complex than many of us have been taught. I suggest that a multispecies epistemology of death can remind (or teach) us that death is not only something that all earthlings navigate. More, it is something that each individual creature encounters differently—a mystery that we do not, entirely, understand. In this view death is not a punishment, a form of evil, or a condition to either escape or wield against others as a weapon. Instead, as Francis of Assisi once suggested, death is simply part of the complex fabric of creation—a sister.

The conventional formula for dividing religious and secular connects religion to emotion and secularity to rationality. However, recent work in what has been called critical secularism studies has challenged this orientation. This body of scholarship has proposed that the line between secular and religious is blurry, and that we should expect the secular, like religion, to be determined by feeling. This paper considers the desire built into secular science as a vehicle not only of important scientific achievements, but also scientific violence. What Aristotle called the “desire to know” can be linked to a history of extraordinary racialized and gendered forms of violence throughout the history of science, as well as scientific violence directed at nonhuman animals.

If we follow Marx in assuming that species-being is always determined by specific social and historical conditions, we might wonder whether we have reached a stage at which the massive intervention into the natural order of things forces us to recognize the entanglement of the fate of humans with that of other species and therefore compels us to extend our sense of species-being to include all living species. Analyzing Robert J. Lifton’s notion of “species self” as an extension of the individual and communal self, I argue that we must extend the notion of species self to include other species as well as humans. This would mean facing the challenge of thinking of humans as trans-species beings – not in the sense of a posthuman trans-species reproduction but in the sense that humans are always already co-constructed in relation with other species. As corporeal, sensuous beings, humans share vulnerability and mortality with other species and are dependent on sustainable environments for their wellbeing. The extent to which human capitalist economies have threatened the life of a sustainable planet by exploiting its resources generates a particular responsibility and obligation to care. We are in other words at a historical conjuncture where our ethics of care needs to include trans-species care and our ecologies of mind and personhood need to become grounded in a sense of transspecies selves.

Animals feature prominently throughout the entirety of the Islamic tradition. Remarks on animals in verses of the Qurʾān and in the sayings of the Prophet laid the foundation for critical reflection on animal lives in theology, philosophy, and jurisprudence. Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210), prolific author and innovative thinker, was an Ashʿarī theologian and post-Avicennan philosopher. He discusses animal intelligence throughout his many works, using both philosophical analysis and religious proofs to argue that animals are in fact knowers in a rich way. In this contribution, I will trace the relation of human-animal knowledge creation throughout Faḫr al-Dīn’s many discussions of animal knowing. The various methodologies he employs reveal different modes of knowing, some that human beings and animals share and some that are proper to animals or to human beings alone. Central to his discussions of interspecies epistemology are the issues of agency and moral responsibility, since a basic impetus for Faḫr al-Dīn’s account lies in the interspecies world depicted in the Qurʾān. Altogether, his discussions form the basis for a complex moral epistemology.

In a classic debate depicted in an early scripture of the Jains, a foundational critique of Buddhist ethics can be found. The Jain mendicant Adda, upon encountering some Buddhist monks, caricatures a normative Buddhist approach to ethical responsibility in which “intention” (cetanā) is the benchmark for karmic culpability: “If someone puts a man or a child on a spit and roasts it on a fire taking it for a lump of oil-cake, it would be fit for Buddhists to end their vow of fasting with.” (Bollée 1999: 413) Much modern academic discourse on Buddhist theories of action has contributed to constructing a similar caricature of a Buddhist mentalist or internalist understanding of action and its consequences. But is such an image really justified when it comes to practices and onto-epistemic commitments on the ground in South Asia? In this essay, I interrogate this question by recourse to mainstream Buddhist sources from the early centuries of the Common Era. These sources systematically detail a theory of karma in the context of Buddhist practice (yogācāra). By exploring relationships that a practitioner is encouraged to develop with a variety of non-human beings—and the conceptions of such beings and their modes of knowing/embodiment within a broader theory of karma—I hope to shed light on a particular Buddhist cosmovision. By looking at depictions of colonies of minute “worms” that reside within the body, theories about distinct life forces for a variety of animal embodiments, the role of nāgas in regulating the weather, and prescriptions for not harming various kinds of spirits, I seek to complicate how scholars think about the notion of “intention” and its connection to action and sentience within the context of Buddhist thought and practice.

As the founder of We Animals Media and a photojournalist documenting the plight of animals on all seven continents for almost two decades, Jo-Anne McArthur will be exploring animal photojournalism and its place in the world of photography and media. Animal photojournalism (APJ) is an emergent genre of photography that captures, memorializes, and exposes the experiences of animals who live amongst us, but who we fail to see. McArthur will illustrate the important role of APJ through the We Animals' calling card project HIDDEN.

David Rothenberg will present his latest interspecies musical investigation, not simply with individual birds or whales or bugs as he has done in the past, but will demonstrate music made together with entire underwater environments, the pandemic-directed investigation of the underwater sound world of what he thought were ordinary ponds right nearby his upstate home. The results, musical and philosophical, are anything but ordinary.