Creaturely Cosmologies: Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Liberation [Hardcover]

Metaphysicsor the grand narratives about reality that shape a communityhas historically been identified as one of the primary oppressive factors in violence against animals, the environment, and other subordinated populations. Yet, this rejection of metaphysics has allowed inadequate worldviews to be smuggled back into secular rights-based systems, and into politics, language, arts, economics, media, and science under the guise of value-free and narrowly human-centric facts that relegate many populations to the margins and exclude them from consideration as active members of the planetary community. Those concerned with systemic violence against creatures and other oppressed populations must overcome this allergy to metaphysics in order to illuminate latent assumptions at work in their own worldviews, and to seek out dynamic, many-sided, and relational narratives about reality that are more adequate to a universe of responsive and creative world-shaping creatures. This text examines two such worldviewsWhiteheads process-relational thought in the west and the nonviolent Indian tradition of Jainismalongside theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and F?lix Guattari, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, that offer a new perspective on metaphysics as well as the creaturely kin and planetary fellows with whom we co-shape our future.Brianne Donaldson is visiting assistant professor of philosophy and religious studies at Monmouth College.

A fine example of [a] multi-pronged, intersectional approach can be found in Brianne Donaldson's Creaturely Cosmologies: Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Liberation (Lexington 2015). Donaldson creatively takes up the challenge of linking work in critical animal studies with a broader ontological and political framework that extends beyond the human in a variety of directions. Her work is crucially important for current discussions in animal studies inasmuch as she is committed as both an activist and theorist to anilsÂ