February 15, 2022

Trees

56 minutes

Have you ever hugged a tree? In episode 45 of Overthink, Ellie and David head into nature to explore the philosophical side of trees. Often, trees have been ignored, even as they populate so much of the space around us. Why did Socrates say he could learn nothing from trees, and why did Nietzsche write so romantically about them? Deleuze and Guattari criticize trees for being too vertically organized, but Michael Marder argues that they're far more cooperative than we ever imagined. In that spirit, trees are clearly alive, but Peter Wohlleben goes as far as to say they could possibly be intelligent, and even have language of their own. Does that mean that trees deserve rights? Ellie and David get into the root of it in episode 45!

Works Discussed

Richard Powers, The Overstory
Plato, Phaedrus
Martin Buber, I and Thou
Aristotle, De Anima
Plotinus, Enneads
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life
Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate
Massimo E. Maffei and Wilhelm Boland, “The Silent Scream of the Lima Bean”
Monica Gagliano et al., “Learning by association in plants”
Monica Gagliano et al., “Plants learn and remember: let’s get used to it”
Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka, The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness
Christopher Stone, “Should Trees Have Standing?”
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Michael Marder, “In (Philosophical) Defense of Trees”