The margins of philosophy are populated by non-human, non-animal living beings, including plants. While contemporary philosophers tend to refrain from raising ontological and ethical concerns with vegetal life, Michael Marder puts this life at the forefront of the current deconstruction of metaphysics. He identifies the existential features of plant behavior and the vegetal heritage of human thought so as to affirm the potential of vegetation to resist the logic of totalization and to exceed the narrow confines of instrumentality. Reconstructing the life of plants "after metaphysics," Marder focuses on their unique temporality, freedom, and material knowledge or wisdom. In his formulation, "plant-thinking" is the non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants, as much as the process of bringing human thought itself back to its roots and rendering it plantlike.

Foreword by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago ZabalaAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: To Encounter the Plants . . . Part I. Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics1. The Soul of the Plant2. The Body of the PlantPart II. Vegetal Existentiality3. The Time of Plants4. The Freedom of Plants5. The Wisdom of PlantsEpilogue: The Ethical Offshoots of Plant-ThinkingNotesWorks CitedIndex