Plants have been—and, for reasons of human sustenance and creative inspiration, will continue to be—centrally important to societies globally. Yet, plants—including herbs, shrubs, and trees—are commonly characterized in Western thought as passive, sessile, and silent automatons lacking a brain, as accessories or backdrops to human affairs. Paradoxically, the qualities considered absent in plants are those employed by biologists to argue for intelligence in animals. Yet an emerging body of research in the sciences and humanities challenges animal-centred biases in determining consciousness, (...) intelligence, volition, and complex communication capacities amongst living beings. In light of recent theoretical developments in our understandings of plants, this article proposes an interdisciplinary framework for researching flora: human-plant studies. Building upon the conceptual formations of the humanities, social sciences, and plant sciences as advanced by Val Plumwood, Deborah Bird Rose, Libby Robin, and most importantly Matthew Hall and Anthony Trewavas, as well as precedents in the emerging areas of human-animal studies, I will sketch the conceptual basis for the further consideration and exploration of this interdisciplinary framework. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to discuss the idea of dialogue with nature. Even though the idea of dialogue with animals, plants – even objects of inanimate nature – is well known, it has usually been treated as an expression of a naive or folk view. Yet, it has recently gained in importance as an idea that is used to describe an ecological approach to natural environment and tends to be treated as a foundation for an ecological culture. A (...) noteworthy contribution to the reconsideration of the concept of human-nature dialogue has also been given by a number of contemporary philosophers who have offered an environmental reinterpretation of phenomenology and hermeneutics based on, among other things, Martin Buber’s concept of the I-You relationship. The paper will focus on two aspects of the concept of dialogue, namely on its epistemological and ethical implications. Following Erazim Kohák’s theory, which will be presented as a key figure of a particular manner of speaking about nature, one that leads to ecological personalism. (shrink)