Progress Review Seminar: ' Val Plumwood’s Wisdom of Love (of the Land): Rethinking philosophy as love-centred' - Codie Condos Distratis

In this presentation, I highlight the links between love and death in the later work of Val Plumwood, and coincidingly draw upon the intersections between this work of Plumwood’s and the work of Luce Irigaray. In Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Plumwood makes the case that Platonic philosophy reflects a “philosophy of death,” whereby death is centred in philosophy and reinforces a dualistic human/nature relation. Death is aligned with the philosophical life of contemplation, and provides access to the world of Forms, enabling a continuity of the human soul beyond earthly life. Plumwood argues that this perspective is both anti-ecological and anti-life, insofar as it denies any positive or meaningful relationship with nature. By making reference to Irigaray’s reading of Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium, I expand upon Plumwood’s eco-animist elaborations on love and death; and I argue that re-centring love in philosophical discourse helps to retain death as integral to our human condition without denying the very real and regenerative aspects of living.