Edward Kohn. He is Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University and winner of the 2014 Gregory Bateson Prize. He is known for the book How Forests Think.
His book, How Forests Think (2013), published in Spanish in 2021, has been described by Cambridge anthropology professor Marilyn Strathern as "a leap in thinking in the most creative sense" and "[ a] supreme artifact of human skill at symbolic thought» The work draws on a four-year ethnographic fieldwork with the Runa in the Upper Amazon to challenge the most basic assumptions of anthropological thought.
Using the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce, Kohn proposes that all forms of life, not only human beings, participate in processes of meaning and, therefore, should be considered capable of thinking and learning. Arguing that the self does not belong only to human beings, Kohn proposes that any entity that communicates through the use of signs can be considered a self, leading to a complex "ecology of selves" that includes both human beings and human beings. humans as well as non-humans. Kohn's work draws on a growing literature, from authors such as Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who seek to push the social sciences beyond the limits of strictly human relationships.
How Forests Think has been criticized for using a very weak definition of 'thinking': 'Under such a definition, a wide range of things could be said to think. However, this is not a revolutionary discovery; it is simply a semantic change that gives the illusion of novelty». Furthermore, it has been argued that Kohn's weak definition of thought does not account for the phenomenon of anthropomorphism and animism discussed by Philippe Descola and others.
In 2014, HAU included an entire section based on a symposium on the book "How Forests Think" that included contributions from Bruno Latour and Philippe Descola.