John Dewey, Ecology, and the Botanical Bases of Experiential Goodness

Developments within continental philosophy and humanistic theory within the 21st century have increasingly turned to more embodied, including ecologically-attuned, accounts of the basis of experience, acting as a corrective to social constructivist views that foreground distinctively linguistic and cultural forces in comprehensively shaping worldly affairs. Some of these accounts struggle to find a way to articulate how experience that outstrips the human can be articulated by situated human perspectives (e.g. new materialisms and speculative realisms), while others struggle to outrun the legacy of deeply anthropocentric, immaterial methodologies and concerns (e.g. eco-phenomenologies). Using a transactional or “neutral monist” pragmatist metaphysics (a la John Dewey) as a theoretical touchstone, this book will provide a philosophically rigorous yet accessible and empirical account of how localizable botanical entities and their undergirding landscapes provide a material wellspring for humanistic affects, endeavours, and relationalities, demonstrating how privileging so-called “human” or “extrinsic” values must always necessarily entail acknowledgement of and protections for greater-than-human existences and the conditions and goods that typify them.