Book

Forthcoming from Stanford University Press.

In Instruments of the Soul: A New Encounter with Native American Thought, Samuel Piccolo takes seriously the philosophic traditions and perspectives of Native American peoples for engaging questions of sovereignty, nature, and political legitimacy in the United States and beyond. The book makes the case that contemporary Indigenous accounts of sovereignty and political legitimacy are fundamental claims about the world, not simply reactions to colonial oppression. From this perspective, Piccolo excavates an as-yet-unexplored link between Indigenous political thought and neo-Aristotelian philosophy – finding many surprising, shared understandings of nature, ethics, and politics.

Both traditions maintain a sense of the natural as accessible and intelligible to the human mind, and as ultimately a source of moral knowledge for us. In an age plagued by anxiety, this encounter between Native and Aristotelian thinking suggests to us how we might replace that fearfulness with a more genuine and productive sense of wonder at the world’s meaning.