Sowing Discourse

In The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (2017), philosopher Emanuele Coccia points out that biology, ostensibly the scientific study of “life,” tends to be based largely on concepts drawn from the animal kingdom. Plants have received significantly less attention, in both the life sciences and in philosophy, creating a pervasive zoological bias. Unlike animals (which generally stop developing once they reached sexual maturity), some plants grow continuously, spending their ent