David Abram is a philosopher and ecologist and in the book he argues that our shift toward alphabetic literacy fundamentally changed how we perceive the world. Before writing systems that could be divorced from place and season, oral cultures maintained what he calls “sensuous participation” with the animate earth. Knowledge isn’t something to... See more

‘A central question was: what if we were to really honour and acknowledge the fact that we are animals?’ he explains. ‘How would we think, or speak, about even the most ordinary, taken-for-granted aspect of the world, like shadows, or gravity, or houses, or the weather? So much of the language we’ve inherited is laden with otherworldly assumptions.... See more