The Life of Plants

1553 Plainfield Avenue Northeast,Grand Rapids MI 49505

24 August, 2021

Description

An eight week seminar on contemporary philosophies of plant life with plant-based meals each meeting. Price includes 3 books and 8 dinners. Over the course of the last several decades, thinkers like Alice Waters have encouraged us to reflect more critically on the sources of our nourishment. Although this awareness is often framed as a knowledge of where our food comes from, perhaps the more important knowledge is that of whom it is that produces our daily bread. The work of cooks and farmers, as well as that of our friends and loved ones, is too often overlooked; especially considering how often we require nourishment. But even more fundamentally than farmers and cooks, however, are the beings which allow for nourishment to occur in our world at all. That is, the plants which produce the atmosphere as well as all of the energy that enters into our trophic systems. By synthesizing the elements, plants turn our planet into a living world, yet we hardly know anything of their lives. In this seminar, we will read the texts of several contemporary philosophers whose work attends to the life of plants as a means of “knowing where -- and whom -- our food comes from.” By attending to the life cycles of plants, to their unique relation to the world, their rootedness, their special capacity to turn light, air, water, and earth into life, we will see that by reflecting on the lives of plants, our own lives are likewise changed. The purpose of this eight week seminar on “The Life of Plants” is to create a space for participants to critically explore ideas in the recent “vegetal turn” in contemporary philosophy. To this end, participants will meet once a week to share a meal, part of which they will cook under the guidance of the seminar tutor, and discuss three texts in their entirety. For the first two weeks of the course, discussion will be led and directed by the seminar tutor; after that point, the seminar will begin with one or two participants sharing a precis of that week’s reading to begin the weekly discussion. Students will be given the option to submit a final project in the manner of their choosing, e.g. a paper or piece of art, to be evaluated by the course tutor.