Lost Epistemologies and Awareness of Flora

“Lost Epistemologies and Awareness of Flora” (LEAF) explores the historical and philosophical roots of Plant Awareness Disparity (PAD), a term describing the tendency to overlook plant life in education and everyday perception. Rather than treating PAD as a cognitive bias, LEAF theorises it as a form of epistemic exclusion shaped by classificatory systems that determined what counts as life and whose knowledge is recognised as legitimate. The project examines how late 19th- and early 20th-century scientific and philosophical frameworks—structured by anatomical hierarchies, gendered disciplinary boundaries, and the professionalisation of science—rendered plant life and its interpreters invisible to Philosophy. By recovering the contributions of Rosa Luxemburg, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, and Agnes Arber, LEAF repositions plants not as passive objects but as conceptual resources for thinking transformation, relation, and non-linear growth—categories sidelined in dominant epistemologies. The goal is to provide a new paradigm for understanding the double epistemic exclusion of both plant knowledge and the women who cultivated it, thereby clarifying how these entanglements continue to shape intellectual authority today. No systematic historical or philosophical study has yet theorised PAD as an epistemological construct or analysed its intersection with canon formation and gendered exclusions. LEAF fills this gap through an original methodology combining Cambridge School contextualism, Kuhnian paradigm analysis, Daston’s regimes of objectivity, and historical epistemology, enabling a reconstruction of the semantic, institutional, and epistemic structures that sustain plant invisibility in Philosophy.