Knowing Life

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.

Introduction: From the Limits of Intelligibility to Perceptive Rearrangements SECTION I: LIVING CONCEPTS Praxis A: Threshold Concepts for Multispecies Communication 1. Precursor to Knowledge: Semiosis as Ground of Multispecies Morality 2. Weaving Life and Death Back Together: On Multispecies Mortality 3. Voracious Secularism: Emotional Habitus and the Desire for Knowledge in Animal Experimentation 4. Synchronicities of the Living and the Non-Living 5. Environmental Ethics, Climate Change, and African Social Epistemology SECTION II: GROWING PERCEPTIONS Praxis B: The Obligations of Our Ecological Relations: A Challenge for Land Acknowledgments 6. Decolonizing Listening: From Grammars of Lo Inaudito to Expansive Onto-Epistemic Thresholds 7. Tree of Life-Death: On the Vegetal Wisdom of Life in the Book of Zohar 8. Expansive Modes of Multispecies Knowing toward Nonviolence in the Early Jain Canon 9. Multispecies Kinship and Kindness: Knowing Life through Animist Etiquette and Ethics SECTION III: FREEING SUBJECTIVITIES Praxis C: Knowing Animals in the Anthropocene through Animal Photojournalism 10. Animals, Sex, and Gender: Understanding Animals in Animal Welfare Practice 11. Unknown Patterns of Intersubjectivity: Zhuangzi, the Seabird and the Happy Fish 12. Genre of the Animal: Beyond Racial Capitalist Consumption 13. The Forbidden Turn: Decentering Modern Subjectivity by Integrating Animal and Mystic Affects 14. Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Multispecies Epistemology SECTION IV: EXPERIMENTAL RESPONSES Praxis D: Making Music with Mysterious Species in Ponds 15. A Multispecies Cosmovision: Knowing Nonhumans Beyond the Cognitive Imaginary in Buddhist Thought and Practice 16. Love as a Moral Method: Developing “Attentive Platonic Love” toward Nonhuman Animals 17. Transspecies Selves: Rethinking Species Being and the Boundaries of the Human 18. Knowing Multiply, Unexpectedly, Imaginatively: Decolonizing Knowledge with Gloria Anzaldúa