Join City Lights for a special noon-time event on Earth Day!
Bestiaries of the More-Than-Humane
A Workshop by Jonathon Keats
Free to the Public – Seating Limited – Registration required
(This event will be held in Kerouac Alley, between City Lights and Vesuvio Cafe.)
Through field observations and laboratory experimentation, biologists have shown that nonhuman primates evaluate fairness in terms similar to humans, and that rats manifest humanlike reciprocity in their social arrangements. Based on this evidence, researchers have made persuasive arguments that nonhuman animals are ethical beings. Might some predilections of nonhuman species be more ethically advanced than our own? Might their lifeways reveal areas in which humans have never even considered the need for principled behavior? More-than-human ethical principles have the potential to be transformational. They can inspire greater goodness in people and align values across taxa for the greater good of all on a local and planetary level.
This two-hour hands-on workshop asks people to evaluate the lifeways of animals and plants and fungi they know personally, deriving guidance that might be applied to the human domain. Lessons are inscribed in hand-crafted books inspired by medieval bestiaries. Participants are invited to add their books to the Library of the More-Than-Humane, an online repository hosted by the University of Arizona.
Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, artist, and writer whose transdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities. He is a research associate at the University of Arizona’s College of Fine Arts, a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Biofrontiers Institute and San José State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, a fellow at the Berggruen Institute, a research fellow at the Highland Institute and the Long Now Foundation, principal philosopher at Earth Law Center, and an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute and Biosphere 2.
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation.