Quentin Hiernaux & Benoît Timmermans (eds.), Philosophie du Végétal, Paris: Vrin, 2018, 182 pp., €18

The volume edited by Quentin Hiernaux and Benoît Timmermans intends to inaugurate a promising new field for the philosophical investigation of vegetation that goes hand in hand with the focus on plants in ecology, ethics, psychology, and the plant biology of the recent decades. Since this new science credits vegetal bodies with feelings, language, and cognition, trees are constituted as subjects of thinking. Yet in this volume the authors do not focus on a mere philosophy of plants, or a mere investigation of plants from a philosophical perspective. Instead, by unearthing the new challenges vegetation raises to notions of life, death, individuality, species, memory, and intelligence, the volume proposes a philosophy of vegetation, in which plants create unexplored meanings and new intellectual forms. Notwithstanding the hidden (or obscure) life of plants, vegetation thus emerges as a crucial source to understanding nature as a whole.