Metaphysics—or the grand narratives about reality that shape a community—has historically been identified as one of the primary oppressive factors in violence against animals, the environment, and other subordinated populations. Yet, this rejection of metaphysics has allowed inadequate worldviews to be smuggled back into secular rights-based systems, and into politics, language, arts, economics, media, and science under the guise of value-free and narrowly human-centric facts that relegate many populations to the margins and exclude them from consideration as active members of the planetary community. Those concerned with systemic violence against creatures and other oppressed populations must overcome this allergy to metaphysics in order to illuminate latent assumptions at work in their own worldviews, and to seek out dynamic, many-sided, and relational narratives about reality that are more adequate to a universe of responsive and creative world-shaping creatures. This text examines two such worldviews—Whitehead’s process-relational thought in the west and the nonviolent Indian tradition of Jainism—alongside theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, that offer a new perspective on metaphysics as well as the creaturely kin and planetary fellows with whom we co-shape our future.

"A fine example of [a] multi-pronged, intersectional approach can be found in Brianne Donaldson's Creaturely Cosmologies: Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Liberation (Lexington 2015). Donaldson creatively takes up the challenge of linking work in critical animal studies with a broader ontological and political framework that extends beyond the human in a variety of directions. Her work is crucially important for current discussions in animal studies inasmuch as she is committed as both an activist and theorist to animal liberation while also working to expand non-anthropocentric politics to include a wide variety of other beings and relations." - The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

"[Donaldson] argues that better metaphysics are also good for animals, and she makes a strong case." - Society & Animals

"In Brianne Donaldson’s book, Creaturely Cosmologies, animal ethics and the question of being human are considered in new and inviting ways. . . . Creaturely Cosmologies converses with exciting and emerging perspectives in quantum theory, animal rights activism, and environmentalism while also offering fresh approaches to the works of Derrida, Foucault, Butler, Deleuze, and others who might be familiar to readers of this journal. As a whole, Creaturely Cosmologies is an accessible body of work for any wishing to appreciate an initial foray into Critical Animal Studies, Jainism, and Process-relational philosophy." - Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture

"Both these books [Creaturely Cosmologies and Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes us More and Less than Human by Dominic Pettman] are significant contributions in the domain of Critical Animal Studies and Planetary Studies as both launch a substantial critique of speciesism or species exceptionalism. . . . Based on her studies of Jainism, Donaldson perfectly utilizes Jainist Ahimsa in her exposition of post-hierarchist society of planetary future. . . . Both the books succeed in significant ways to plough new furrows in the domain of planetary studies." - Café Dissensus