Past event

IHME reading circle 28.11.2023

26.10.2023
The cover of Emanuele Coccia's The Life of Plants book and portrait of Sini Mononen, a female in glasses sitting on a chair and leaning on her arm.
Emanuele Coccia: The Life of Plants. Metaphysics of Mixture (Polity Press), Sini Mononen, photo: Riitta Supperi.

Emanuele Coccia and The Life of Plants

Welcome to the reading circle about Emanuele Coccia’s book The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture. We will meet at 17:30–19:00 on Tuesday, 28 November to discuss this book, which, as its name suggests, conceptualizes life through the way of being characteristic of plants, led by musicologist and freelance writer Sini Mononen.

“We barely talk about them and seldom know their names. Philosophy has always overlooked them; even biology considers them as mere decoration on the tree of life. And yet plants give life to the Earth: they produce the atmosphere that surrounds us, they are the origin of the oxygen that animates us. Plants embody the most direct, elementary connection that life can establish with the world.” (Polity Books)

Emanuele Coccia is a philosopher whose dissertation was on Averroës’s thought. Coccia works at the École des Hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. The Life of Plants, published in French in 2016, is his fourth book.

Sini Mononen is a musicologist and freelance writer. For her, The Life of Plants is a book about a way of perceiving the world and about how everything around us affects us. Sini recommends reading The Life of Plants because it can help us see how it is natural for life to evade categories and redefine itself.

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