Knowing Life: The Ethics of Multispecies Epistemologies (Multispecies Encounters)

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.

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.