When Species Meet

by David Abram

Abram shares Haraway's commitment to dissolving the human/nature boundary, but approaches it through phenomenology and indigenous philosophy rather than posthumanist theory. Where Haraway finds grace in the messy encounters between species, Abram traces how written language itself estranged us from the sensory aliveness of the more-than-human world—it's like reading the philosophical prehistory of why we need Haraway's companion species concept in the first place.

by Marlies Busch

Kimmerer, a botanist and Potawatomi author, writes essays that feel like Haraway's dog-training anecdotes but centered on plants and reciprocal relationships with the land. Both authors use personal observation to build toward larger philosophical arguments about kinship, but Kimmerer grounds hers in Indigenous knowledge systems—it's a different cultural vocabulary for the same radical reorientation toward non-human others.

by Donna Jeanne Haraway

This is your surprise pick—it's narrative biography rather than theory, but Wulf traces Alexander von Humboldt's revolutionary insight that nature is an interconnected web rather than a collection of specimens to catalog. Reading about Humboldt's 18th-century awakening to ecological relationality alongside Haraway's 21st-century posthumanism creates an unexpected dialogue across centuries about how we've learned (and are still learning) to see the world as composed of meeting points rather than hierarchies.

by Margaret Atwood

Atwood builds a speculative world where genetic engineering has blurred species boundaries in deeply unsettling ways—it's Haraway's companion species concept run through a dystopian lens. The novel forces you to sit with the consequences of human-animal entanglement when profit and control replace Haraway's ethic of "getting on together with some grace," making her philosophical arguments feel urgently necessary rather than abstract.

by Rupert Sheldrake

Paul argues that thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but extends into our bodies, tools, and environments—a contemporary cognitive science perspective that echoes Haraway's insistence that knowledge emerges from embodied encounters rather than detached observation. If you found Haraway's agility-training anecdotes compelling, you'll appreciate how Paul shows cognition itself as a collaborative, multispecies affair involving our hands, our surroundings, and yes, sometimes our dogs.