ABSTRACT

For Aristotle, and for the philosopher of science Michel Serres, there is nothing in the mind that has not already been sensed. This chapter focuses on the history of knowing birds, and highlights the notion of avian wisdom. It discusses philosophy of Michel Serres in order to set up a more collective approach to knowledge and sensing. The chapter discusses biopolitics, using recent work in sociology and geography to open up possibility for a livelier politics, a politics in which birds and others are treated as knowledgeable rather than mute objects of knowledge. The flight of birds, their seasonal appearances and disappearances, their movements ahead of changes in weather, as well as their airborne vantage, provided for a sense of knowing birds or avian wisdom. The novelist and amateur ornithologist Margaret Atwood summarizes the intrigue that bird knowledge, flight and movement has generated for their terrestrial observers: For as long as we human beings can remember, we've been looking up.