BOOKSHELF

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BOOKSHELF ///// 

Image source: City of Lake Oswego Library, Oregon.

Here is a selection of some of the books that made me who I am.

Stray species: a threat?

Francis Hallé, François Letourneux, Gilles Clement

On October 27, 2010, the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris invited the agricultural engineer Gilles Clément , the botanist and biologist Francis Hallé and the agronomist François Letourneux to a meeting on the dynamics of planetary miscegenation. In it, these three great names in modern botany held a fascinating, erudite and provocative debate on the vagabond species: What are these plants and animals that we call "vagrants"? Do we have to control them? Is it just another mechanism of evolution? This book collects the interventions, revised and enriched by their authors, that took place at that meeting (this excerpt was extracted from the Chandal page of this book). More on: https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/media/8Mttvhg

The nation of plants

In The Nation of Plants, the most important, widespread, and powerful nation on Earth finally gets to speak. Like attentive parents, plants, after making it possible for us to live, have come to our aid once again, giving us their rules: the first Universal Declaration of Rights of Living Beings written by the plants. A short charter based on the general principles that regulate the common life of plants, it establishes norms applicable to all living beings. Compared to our constitutions, which place humans at the center of the entire juridical reality, in conformity with an anthropocentricism that reduces to things all that is not human, plants offer us a revolution (this excerpt was extracted from the Amazon page of this book).

Stefano Mancuso

The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice

Edited by Ryan Holfield, Jayajit Chakraborty and Gordon Walker

The book presents an extensive and cutting-edge introduction to the diverse, rapidly growing body of research on pressing issues of environmental justice and injustice. With wide-ranging discussion of current debates, controversies, and questions in the history, theory, and methods of environmental justice research, contributed by over 90 leading social scientists, natural scientists, humanists, and scholars from professional disciplines from six continents, it is an essential resource both for newcomers to this research and for experienced scholars and practitioners (synopsis from Routledge’s book page).

Anthropocene or capitalocene?
nature, history and the crisis of capitalism

Jason W. Moore

Jason Moore demonstrates historically how the basis of the capitalist system is the engine through which we are depleting the planet Earth. It is not, however, a system shared by all humans, let alone a premisse for our existence.

A companion to Marx’s Capital:
The complete edition

David Harvey

I really suggest reading side by side this book while tackling the three tomes of Capital. It makes the experience much more complete and easier to understand. Reading the Capital is an essential activity to understand the system which underlies our current exploitation of nature, given that not only humans are part of nature but capital is also an essential beginning of the Marxist ecology.

Capital Vol. 1

In this volume Marx presents the concepts (and uses concrete historical, logical and literary developments to do so) of capital, value, money, commodities, labor theory of value, surplus value, primitive accumulation, means of production, class struggles, wage slavery, technological unemployment, overproduction, reproduction of capitalist systems (this review was based on the Wikipedia article on Capital Vol. 1).

Karl Marx

In the second volume, Marx expands on the money lenders, merchants, traders and entrepreneurs, showing workers as essentially sellers of commodity labour power, as they do not own means of production, rather than producers of value and surplus-value (this review was based on the Wikipedia article on Capital Vol. 2).

Capital Vol. 2

Karl Marx

Capital Vol. 3

In the third volume, Marx expands on the idea that rates of profit tend to fall given advancements in production, which can eventually lead to crises in the capitalist mode of production, bearing the birth of new future modes of production. To do that, Marx explains the concepts of profit, merchant’s capital, interest-bearing capital and landed capital, describing the concrete forms which grow from capital as a whole (this review was based on the Wikipedia article on Capital Vol. 3).

Karl Marx

Dialectics of nature

“Everything affects and is affected by every other thing”, as Engels argues, puts him as one of the first ecological thinkers of the modern times. In this book, as the anthropologist Eleanor Leacock (introduction to The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State) said, Engels sought to develop the conceptual basis for understanding “the complete interdependence of human social relations and human relations to nature” (this review was based on the Monthly Review, an Independent Socialist Magazine).

Friedrich Engels

Mathematical models of social evolution

Richard McElreath and Robert Boyd

Over the last several decades, mathematical models have become central to the study of social evolution, both in biology and the social sciences. But students in these disciplines often seriously lack the tools to understand them. A primer on behavioral modeling that includes both mathematics and evolutionary theory, Mathematical Models of Social Evolution aims to make the student and professional researcher in biology and the social sciences fully conversant in the language of the field (this review was extracted from The University of Chicago Press).

Survival of the beautiful

"The peacock's tail," said Charles Darwin, "makes me sick." That's because the theory of evolution as adaptation can't explain why nature is so beautiful. It took the concept of sexual selection for Darwin to explain that, a process that has more to do with aesthetics than with the practical. Survival of the Beautiful is a revolutionary new examination of the interplay of beauty, art, and culture in evolution. Taking inspiration from Darwin's observation that animals have a natural aesthetic sense, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg probes why animals, humans included, have innate appreciation for beauty-and why nature is, indeed, beautiful (this review was extracted from the Amazon page of this book).

David Rothenberg

On the origin of stories

A century and a half after the publication of Origin of Species, evolutionary thinking has expanded beyond the field of biology to include virtually all human-related subjects-anthropology, archeology, psychology, economics, religion, morality, politics, culture, and art. Now a distinguished scholar offers the first comprehensive account of the evolutionary origins of art and storytelling. Brian Boyd explains why we tell stories, how our minds are shaped to understand them, and what difference an evolutionary understanding of human nature makes to stories we love (this excerpt was extracted from JSTOR page of this book).

Brian Boyd

The structure of scientific revolutions

Thomas Kuhn

Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922–1996) is one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, perhaps the most influential. His 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited academic books of all time. Kuhn’s contribution to the philosophy of science marked not only a break with several key positivist doctrines, but also inaugurated a new style of philosophy of science that brought it closer to the history of science. His account of the development of science held that science enjoys periods of stable growth punctuated by revisionary revolutions. To this thesis, Kuhn added the controversial ‘incommensurability thesis’, that theories from differing periods suffer from certain deep kinds of failure of comparability (this review was extracted from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Engineering

Edited by Diane P. Michelfelder, Neelke Doorn

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Engineering will be of value for both students and active researchers in philosophy of engineering and in cognate fields (philosophy of technology, philosophy of design). It is also intended for engineers working both inside and outside of academia who would like to gain a more fundamental understanding of their particular professional field (this review was extracted from Taylor & Francis).

Caliban and the witch

Caliban and the Witch is a history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She shows how the battle against the rebel body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor power and self-ownership, two central principles of modern social organization (this review was extracted from AK Press).

Silvia Federici

Ethics

In this seminal work, Spinoza lays out his ethical philosophy in a precise geometrical order. He argues expressly against the dualism of Descartes and contends instead that everything in the world flows from the essential nature of reality, or God. Human perception of this ultimate truth is imperfect and thus much of human knowledge is incomplete and faulty. Individuals must strive toward a more perfect and virtuous knowledge of truth and reality by controlling their emotions and employing a more scientific and objective approach (this review was extracted from Google Books).

Baruch de Spinoza

Pedagogy of the oppressed

Within the field of social justice, Paulo Freire requires no introduction. His philosophy-based pedagogy has greatly contributed to public education programmes in the 1960s Global South. Working first as a secondary school teacher and later as a university professor in Brazil, he developed a revolutionary pedagogic method that was highly successful in impoverished populations. He rose to prominence during João Goulart’s short-lived leftist government, working in the National Commission of Popular Culture until a military coup d’état in 1964. Forced into exile in Bolivia and Chile, Freire used his experiences in governance and teaching to write Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1968 (this review was extracted from André Gomes review published in Harm Reduction Journal, Springer Nature).

Paulo Freire

La Pachamama y el humano (Spanish and Portuguese)

Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni

La Pachamama y el humano, by Raúl Zaffaroni, is a genealogical tracing of how nature and animals have been recognized or ignored in philosophical and legal thought, whose objective is to laudably point out the advances achieved by the new constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador. These are based on a paradigm different from that of anthropocentric liberal constitutionalism, which always privileged the individual as the sole subject of rights and obligations. Within the recognition of collective rights is the proclamation of the rights of nature (Pacha Mama) as the continent of other rights. An emerging worldview is established that seeks to rebuild the harmony and balance of life, and which is the response of the native communities of our region: the paradigm of Buen Vivir (“Good Living”)' (this review was extracted from Cúspide, translated with DeepL).

Invention du paysage (French and Portuguese)

Anne Cauquelin

An essay on landscape by the philosopher, Anne Cauquelin. The author asserts that for us and our predecessors a landscape has always been a constructed version of nature; she notes that the ancient Greeks had neither a word or a concept to express what we understand a "landscape" to be. She explores her claim that the notion of "landscape" has been invented, and discusses how it functions to situate the viewer's perception of time and space in nature (this review was extracted from the Amazon page of this book).

Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism

Kohei Saito's Karl Marx's Ecosocialism lays waste to accusations of Marx's ecological shortcomings. Delving into Karl Marx's central works, as well as his natural scientific notebooks-published only recently and still being translated, Saito also builds on the works of scholars such as John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, to argue that Karl Marx actually saw the environmental crisis embedded in capitalism. "It is not possible to comprehend the full scope of [Marx's] critique of political economy," Saito writes, "if one ignores its ecological dimension." Saito's book is crucial today, as we face unprecedented ecological catastrophes-crises that cannot be adequately addressed without a sound theoretical framework (this review was extracted from JSTOR).

Kohei Saito

A History and Philosophy of Fluid Mechanics

G. A. Tokaty

Through the centuries, the intricacies of fluid mechanics — the study of the laws of motion and fluids in motion — have occupied many of history's greatest minds. In this pioneering account, a distinguished aeronautical scientist presents a history of fluid mechanics focusing on the achievements of the pioneering scientists and thinkers whose inspirations and experiments lay behind the evolution of such disparate devices as irrigation lifts, ocean liners, windmills, fireworks and spacecraft. The author first presents the basics of fluid mechanics, then explores the advances made through the work of such gifted thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, da Vinci, Galileo, Pascal, Newton, Bernoulli, Euler, Lagrange, Ernst Mach and other scientists of the 20th century. Especially important for its illuminating comparison of the development of fluid mechanics in the former Soviet Union with that in the West, the book concludes with studies of transsonic compressibility and aerodynamics, supersonic fluid mechanics, hypersonic gas dynamics and the universal matter-energy continuity (this review was extracted from Dover Publications page of this book).

What’s yours is mine

The news is full of their names, supposedly the vanguard of a rethinking of capitalism. Lyft, Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Uber, and many more companies have a mandate of disruption and upending the “old order"—and they’ve succeeded in effecting the “biggest change in the American workforce in over a century," according to former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. But this new wave of technology companies is funded and steered by very old-school venture capitalists. And in What’s Yours Is Mine, technologist Tom Slee argues the so-called sharing economy damages development, extends harsh free-market practices into previously protected areas of our lives, and presents the opportunity for a few people to make fortunes by damaging communities and pushing vulnerable individuals to take on unsustainable risk. Drawing on original empirical research, Slee shows that the friendly language of sharing, trust, and community masks a darker reality (this review was extracted from JSTOR).

Tom Slee

Ideas to postpone the end of the world

Indigenous peoples have faced the end of the world before. Now, humankind is on a collective march towards the abyss. Global pandemics, extreme weather, and massive wildfires define this era many now call the Anthropocene. From Brazil comes Ailton Krenak, renowned Indigenous activist and leader, who demonstrates that our current environmental crisis is rooted in society’s flawed concept of “humanity” — that human beings are superior to other forms of nature and are justified in exploiting it as we please. To stop environmental disaster, Krenak argues that we must reject the homogenizing effect of this perspective and embrace a new form of “dreaming” that allows us to regain our place within nature. In Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, he shows us the way (this review was extracted from House of Anansi Press page of this book).

Ailton Krenak

Not exactly: in praise of vagueness

Kees van Deemter

Our lives are full of inexactitude. We say a person is tall or an action is just without the precision of measurement on a dial. In this engaging account, Kees van Deemter explores vagueness, cutting across areas such as language, mathematical logic, and computing. He considers why vagueness is inherent, and why it is important in how we function (this review was extracted from PhilPapers page of this book).

Espinoza e Zen Budismo (Portuguese)

What would there be in common in the trajectory of Baruch Spinoza, one of the main Western philosophers, and Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha? This book approaches the experience of both, starting especially from the concept of Beatitude as expounded by Spinoza, relating it to the Enlightenment advocated by Zen Buddhism. To account for these experiences of the "unspeakable," Donati Caleri follows an ethical/aesthetic/political path, for it is from the practice and experience of these two characters that these concepts are based. The political sense of freedom, which emanates from the authors' work, is an invitation to think about how we are producing our lives in the midst of a world that does its best to produce servitude (this review was extracted from 7Letras page of this book and translated with DeepL).

Donati Caleri

T. R. Oke, G. Mills, A. Christen, J.A. Voogt

Urban Climates

Urban Climates is the first full synthesis of modern scientific and applied research on urban climates. The book begins with an outline of what constitutes an urban ecosystem. It develops a comprehensive terminology for the subject using scale and surface classification as key constructs. It explains the physical principles governing the creation of distinct urban climates, such as airflow around buildings, the heat island, precipitation modification and air pollution, and it then illustrates how this knowledge can be applied to moderate the undesirable consequences of urban development and help create more sustainable and resilient cities. With urban climate science now a fully-fledged field, this timely book fulfills the need to bring together the disparate parts of climate research on cities into a coherent framework. It is an ideal resource for students and researchers in fields such as climatology, urban hydrology, air quality, environmental engineering and urban design (this review was extracted from Cambridge University Press page of this book).

Philosophy of Science: a contemporary introduction

Any serious student attempting to better understand the nature, methods, and justification of science will value Alex Rosenberg and Lee McIntyre’s updated and substantially revised fourth edition of Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction. Weaving lucid explanations with clear analyses, the volume is a much-used, thematically oriented introduction to the field (this review was extracted from Routledge page of this book).

Alex Rosenberg

The revolutionary genius of plants

On the forefront of uncovering the essential truths about plants, world-renowned scientist Stefano Mancuso reveals the surprisingly sophisticated ability of plants to innovate, to remember, and to learn, offering us creative solutions to the most vexing technological and ecological problems that face us today. Despite not having brains or central nervous systems, plants perceive their surroundings with an even greater sensitivity than animals. They efficiently explore and react promptly to potentially damaging external events thanks to their cooperative, shared systems; without any central command centers, they are able to remember prior catastrophic events and to actively adapt to new ones (this review was extracted from Simon & Schuster page of this book).

Stefano Mancuso

The metamorphosis of plants

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Metamorphosis of Plants, published in 1790, was Goethe's first major attempt to describe what he called in a letter to a friend “the truth about the how of the organism.” Inspired by the diversity of flora he found on a journey to Italy, Goethe sought a unity of form in diverse structures. He came to see in the leaf the germ of a plant's metamorphosis—“the true Proteus who can hide or reveal himself in all vegetal forms”—from the root and stem leaves to the calyx and corolla, to pistil and stamens. With this short book—123 numbered paragraphs, in the manner of the great botanist Linnaeus—Goethe aimed to tell the story of botanical forms in process, to present, in effect, a motion picture of the metamorphosis of plants. It demonstrates vividly Goethe's ideas of transformation and interdependence, as well as the systematic use of imagination in scientific research—which influenced thinkers ranging from Darwin to Thoreau and has much to teach us today about our relationship with nature (this review was extracted from The MIT Press page of this book).

The hidden life of trees

One of the most beloved books of our time: an illuminating account of the forest, and the science that shows us how trees communicate, feel, and live in social networks. After reading this book, a walk in the woods will never be the same again (this review was extracted from Google Books).

Peter Wohlleben

The burnout society

Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection (this review was extracted from the Stanford University Press of this book).

Byung-Chul Hahn

Cannibal metaphysics

The iconoclastic Brazilian anthropologist and theoretician Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, well known in his discipline for helping initiate its "ontological turn," offers a vision of anthropology as "the practice of the permanent decolonization of thought." After showing that Amazonian and other Amerindian groups inhabit a radically different conceptual universe than ours-in which nature and culture, human and nonhuman, subject and object are conceived in terms that reverse our own-he presents the case for anthropology as the study of such "other" metaphysical schemes, and as the corresponding critique of the concepts imposed on them by the human sciences. Along the way, he spells out the consequences of this anthropology for thinking in general via a major reassessment of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, arguments for the continued relevance of Deleuze and Guattari, dialogues with the work of Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, and Marilyn Strathern, and inventive treatments of problems of ontology, translation, and transformation. Bold, unexpected, and profound,Cannibal Metaphysicsis one of the chief works marking anthropology's current return to the theoretical center stage (this review was extracted from the JSTOR page of this book).

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Trabalho e linguagem (Portuguese)

Work, language, socialism. Fernando Haddad shows in this set of studies that it is necessary to unveil the relationships among these three great themes in order to revitalize the critical knowledge for practical purposes that is at the core of what has been proudly called dialectics and materialism (this review was extracted from the Amazon page of this book, translated with DeepL. Haddad was São Paulo’s mayor and since 2023 served as Brazilian Minister of Finance).

Fernando Haddad

Introdução à Economia Solidária (Portuguese)

He is probably the Brazilian researcher that has been dedicating himself with more persistence, in the last few years, to the work of rethinking the socialist utopia from the hard lessons offered by the distortions and dictatorial directions taken in the experience of the so-called real socialism. For people like me, who have never believed in the viability of a socialism in which the State decides everything, nor can they imagine a society based on absolute egalitarianism, which anesthetizes the impulse that each one of us has for growth, this study by Singer is worth as a balm and as a true source of light (this excerpt was extracted from the President of Brazil Luis Inácio Lula da Silva review at Paul Singer’s website).

Paul Singer

O Bem Viver (Portuguese, German and Spanish)

Alberto Acosta's book has a didactic objective: to explain the main characteristics of the principle of Sumak Kawsay, the “Good Life” (Buen vivir in Spanish, Bem viver in Portuguese, Gutes leben in German), as a constitutionally based orientation. He presents it as a principle that, from an indigenous contribution, is valid far beyond indigenous peoples and Ecuador itself. It is a principle of the 21st century, of the century that begins with the entry on the world political agenda of the ecological limits of capitalist development. In affirming such a principle, Ecuador comes out of the cage of dependency and political and ideological underdevelopment, and asserts itself as a country on an equal footing with all other countries, determined to share the global causes that are worth fighting for if the future is really going to have a future (this excerpt was extracted from Socioeco.org and translated with DeepL. It is published in Portuguese by Rosa Luxemburgo press).

Alberto Acosta

Alternativas sistémicas (Portuguese and Spanish)

The weakening of the left's systemic critique is today one of the main weaknesses of the struggle against the advance of conservatism, authoritarianism, racism, xenophobia, intolerance, and neo-fascism. To value utopian horizons of other social types is not unrealism or an expression of political impotence: it is to rescue indispensable compasses to direct and stimulate old and new struggles. In Bolsonaro's Brazil, the debate on Living Well, degrowth, commons, ecofeminism, Mother Earth's rights, and deglobalization, proposed in this book, offers oxygen for a left that needs to reinvigorate itself, and, above all, reinvent itself (this excerpt was extracted from Editora Elefante and translated with DeepL).

Pablo Solón

Pós-extrativismo e decrescimento (Portuguese and German “Radikale Alternativen”)

The cultural theorist Fredric Jameson once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. In our society, alternatives to the capitalist system are usually ridiculed as mere utopias. But why is that? Can't we combine the various counter-designs from the global South and North to break out of the labyrinth of capitalism once and for all? In their new book, Alberto Acosta and Ulrich Brand invite us to do just that. They argue for a unified vision of a fairer, better future, to be developed along the commonalities and differences of the European concept of degrowth and Latin American post-extractivism (this excerpt was extracted from oekom and translated with DeepL).

Alberto Acosta and Ulrich Brand

Descolonizar o imaginário (Portuguese)

The promise of development has always exerted a kind of fascination on the left and right of the political spectrum. While it heralded well-being and quality of life, it reduced all aspects of human existence - and the cultural diversity of peoples - to the parameters set by the market and consumption.Decolonizing the Imaginary proposes a debate on development from a broad and diverse perspective. Its thirteen essays present a critical reflection on the model of subordinate integration of Latin America into the neoliberal global market that has not been abandoned after the rise of progressive governments. More than that, the texts thus foster an urgent dialogue on the need to build a renewed horizon to overcome the contingencies typical of the patriarchal, colonial, and classist state (this excerpt was extracted from Editora Elefante and translated with DeepL).

Org: Miriam Lang, Gerhard Dilger & Jorge Pereira Neto

Cultura: um conceito antropológico (Portuguese)

An introduction to the anthropological concept of culture, carried out in a didactic, clear and simple way. The first part of the book refers to the concept of culture from the Enlightenment to the modern authors, while the second part seeks to demonstrate how culture influences social behavior and greatly diversifies humanity, despite its proven biological unity. The author tries to use, whenever possible, examples referring to our society and the tribal societies that share our territory, which does not prevent the use of examples from authors working in other parts of the world (this excerpt was extracted from the Amazon page of this book and translated with DeepL).

Roque de Barros Laraia