The Philosopher Who Believes in Living Things

Human beings have a lot of difficult work to do if we’re to learn to recognize the inherent worth of all vibrant matter.

being genuinely open to and affected by everything around us means that there is no picking and choosing. It is everything or nothing—the good, the bad, and the ugly

Bennett’s musings have an ethical component: if a nuisance tree, or a dead tree, or a dead rat is my kin, then everything is kin—even a piece of trash. And I’m more likely to value things that are kindred to me, seeing them as notable and worthy in themselves

Working on the house has started to feel like an ongoing dialogue. Rather than imposing our preconceived ideas onto a bunch of inert matter, we often find ourselves asking, What does the house want? People who visit sometimes remark on the special feel of the place. They’ll ask, How did you make this house so cozy? The answer, as Bennett has shown

A force of nature is obviously just the opposite of an inert actor,” Latour wrote

In 1917, the sociologist Max Weber argued that “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world

When we claim that there is, on one side, a natural world and, on the other, a human world, we are simply proposing to say, after the fact, that an arbitrary portion of the actors will be stripped of all action and that another portion, equally arbitrary, will be endowed with souls

take perspectives that seem implausible and find the good intuitions embodied in them, and then go with it