David Abram (born June 24, 1957) is an American philosopher, cultural ecologist, and performance artist, best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with environmental and ecological issues.[1][2] He is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology[3] (2010) and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (2006), for which he received, among other prizes, the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. Abram is founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE); his essays on the cultural causes and consequences of ecological disarray have appeared often in such journals as Orion, Environmental Ethics, Parabola, Tikkun, and The Ecologist, as well as numerous anthologies.



The Spell of the Sensuous, Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, New York: Vintage (1996) draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and Abram's own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which--even at its most abstract--echoes the calls and cries of the earth. On every page of this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with passion and intellectual daring.


"Long awaited, revolutionary...This book ponders the violent disconnection of the body from the natural world and what this means about how we live and die in it."--Los Angeles Times

Becoming Animal, An Earthly Cosmology (chapters one, two and one of the middle ones): As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long weΓÇÖve ignored the wild intelligence of our bodies, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. AbramΓÇÖs writing subverts this distance, drawing readers ever closer to their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the human body and the breathing Earth. The shape-shifting of ravens, the erotic nature of gravity, the eloquence of thunder, the pleasures of being edible: all have their place in this book.

One other essay.

Files are all pdf. 

Not my work. For The Spell of the Sensuous, I just merged the single-page files of another torrent up here and cropped them a little bit. Some pen-markings, water-damage on certain corners. All totally readable.