What can two disciplines as distinct and apparently divergent as philosophy and botany have to do with each other? Further, what can either of them have to do with feminist theory? In this lecture, Stella Sandford will try to show that with a more generous conception of philosophy and the history of philosophy than is conventional we can see how the combination of these different disciplines and their histories can sharpen our focus in the investigation of specific problems or issues. She will argue against the still common presumption that the investigation of nature on the one hand, and the investigation of history on the other, are tasks for different disciplines, scientific and humanistic respectively. She will illustrate this by developing the idea of a natural history of sex which – perhaps surprisingly – comes into clearest focus in the history of botany rather than zoology. This is neither the history of a purely natural phenomenon, nor a cultural history that has nothing to do with ‘nature’. It is, rather, a true natural-historical story with points of conversion with contemporary botany, philosophy of biology and feminist theory.
Stella Sandford is Professor in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. Her research focuses on plant philosophy and the relation between philosophy and botany, philosophy of natural history, philosophies of sex and gender and feminist philosophy and theory. She is the author of Plato and Sex (Polity, 2010), How to Read Beauvoir (Granta/Norton, 2006), The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas (Athlone/Continuum, 2000) and numerous articles and book chapters. Her most recent book is Vegetal Sex: Philosophy of Plants (Bloomsbury 2022).
Sponsored by the Linda Singer Memorial Fund and Department of Philosophy
