Non-Human Intelligence, Agency, and Freedom

The rise of plant intelligence is both an epistemic and ethical event, revealing the contradictions of an age that has wielded knowledge in pursuit of mastery over nature—only to find that human mastery now demands its own undoing. Prominent botanists argue that recognizing plant intelligence requires reforming the scientific method, surpassing its limits to grasp cognition beyond the human. But this assumes that knowledge takes root in an antecedent ground revealed once we get our methods right. Drawing on pragmatist readings of Hegel, I argue that knowledge is instead rooted in the shifting criteria of historical authority, which change as thought’s boundaries are redrawn. Thought takes root not in fixed foundations, in other words, but in justification’s provisional grounds. The recent emergence of plant intelligence thus marks not just an expansion of knowledge but a reckoning with human mastery as the criteria justifying our domination of nature shift beneath us. 

Situating human freedom and agency within the context of more-than-human forms of freedom and agency can correct false understandings of freedom as independence. The possibility of complex forms of freedom is predicated on the prior existence of simpler forms of freedom and carry with them heightened modes of interdependence and vulnerability.  Recognition of the dialectic of freedom and dependency can correct human exceptionalism without obscuring the distinctive forms of freedom and agency that are possible for language-using animals.  This paper develops such an account in dialogue with the philosophical anthropology of Helmut Plessner, Hans Jonas’s notion of “needful freedom,” and contemporary philosopher of biology Evan Thompson’s understanding of the autopoietic character of living organisms in constant exchange with their surroundings. 

The underworld, as a mythical space in western culture, has often been associated with fear, horror, or damnation. It hasn’t typically been a space of desire: it’s not the sort of place that people dream of ending up. And yet, something has been changing in the underworld. The work of scientists—ecologists, foresters, mycologists—is revealing an underworld that is more alive, and more life-giving, than the underworld of western histories. Is this new underworld becoming a zone of salvation, rather than damnation? Or is the chill of horror in the underworld something we just can’t shake? This paper offers an experiment in plant, and fungal, thinking in order to explore—in conversation with roots, dirt, and mycorrhizal networks—the intimacies between life and death, beauty and horror, or possibility and closure that underworlds may have always (and may continue) to confront us with. 

At the margins of Islamic orthodoxy in the 9th century, an esoteric philosophical society, the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’ (Brethren of Purity), engaged the public in a utopian and equitable vision of collective life. Within their renowned encyclopedic treatise, Epistle 22: The Case of the Animals versus Man occupies a special place. This paper identifies three registers of critique within the animals’ grievances and humanity’s defense of its assumed superiority: anthropocentrism, logocentrism, and ethnocentrism. By integrating these critiques with the Quranic notions of Mīzān (balance), Khalīfah (lieutenancy), and Amānah (trust), this paper explores how this allegorical fable reveals the link between ecological injustices and unjust social imaginaries. The successors of the Ikhwān, the contemporary Ismailis, have continued this tradition of environmental stewardship. This paper maps the shared moral imperatives espoused by the Brethren onto the mission of the Aga Khan Development Network, an institution that has mobilized global efforts against climate crises.