Emanuele Coccia: Plants Make Us Human

What this episode covers

Plants give life to Earth, but we don’t really think about them very often. We don’t know their names. We don’t know their powers as medicine. Philosophers, thinkers and writers have long neglected them and rarely acknowledge their power over our lives. Plants are everywhere and give us the very air that we breathe, but we take them for granted. So Italian academic and writer, Emanuele Coccia, argues in his fascinating book, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, which skirts the line between philosophy, nature writing and science. In this conversation, Coccia talks to host Adria Vasil (journalist and author of the bestselling Ecoholic series) about why we should think more about the vital ways that plants shape our lives. Emanuele Coccia is an Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He received his PhD in Florence and was formerly an Assistant Professor of History of Philosophy in Freiburg, Germany. He worked on the history of European normativity and on aesthetics. His current research topics focus on the ontological status of images and their normative power, especially in fashion and advertising. Among his publications: La trasparenza delle immagini. Averroè e l’averroismo (Milan 2005, Spanish translation 2008), La vie sensible (Paris 2010, translated in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian; English translation in press) and Le bien dans les choses (Paris 2013 translated in Italian and Spanish; English and German translation in press). With Giorgio Agamben as a co-editor, he published an anthology on angels in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts: Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam (Milan 2009). Adria Vasil is a Canadian environmental journalist. She started writing NOW Magazine's Ecoholic column in 2004 and has published three books based on her column: Ecoholic, Ecoholic Home, and Ecoholic Body. Vasil is a lecturer at the Ryerson School of Journalism, from which she herself graduated in 2003.