Description
Book SynopsisMuch has been written about animals in applied ethics, environmental ethics, and animal rights. This book takes a new turn, offering an examination of the 'animal question' from a more fundamental, philosophical-anthropological perspective. The contributors in this important volume focus on how the animal has appeared and can be used in philosophical argumentation as a metaphor or reference point that helps us understand what is distinctively human and what is not. A recurring theme in the essays is the existence of a zone of ambiguity between animals and humans, which puts into question comfortable assumptions about the uniqueness and superiority of human nature. While the chapters straddle the boundaries of historical-philosophical and systematic, continental and analytic approaches, their thematic unity knits them together, presenting a rich, broad, and yet cohesive perspective. The first part of the book offers general explorations of the relation between animal and human nature, and of the concomitant existential and ethical dimensions of this relationship. The chapters in the second part address the same theme, but, in so doing, focus on specific aspects of animal and human nature: imagination, the political, historicity, shame, finitude, and joy.
Trade ReviewThe Animal Inside throws new light, immersing itself into the discussions that help building social thought about nonhuman animals as we conceive it today. The perspective of this work is not ethical or moral, but a philosophical-anthropological one, even though ethical and moral concern is always near when it comes to the link between species. […] As a whole, this work offers a deep analysis over the most widespread western ideas on animals: although still dealing with human-nonhuman centrality as axis, it brings new thinking on longstanding problems. * Language & Ecology, 2018 *
Table of ContentsIntroduction / PART I: General Explorations of Human and Animal Nature / 1. Nonhuman animals: a shared life and a licence to kill, Giulia Sissa (Professor of Classics, UCLA) / 2. Kata Phusin: Ancient and Contemporary Perspectives on the Hermeneutics of Animality, Thomas Kiefer (PhD-candidate in Philosophy, Fordham University) / 3. Animal and Human Nature in Early Modern Philosophy: Spinoza and Hume, Rudmer Bijlsma (Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Antwerp) / 4. Kafka’s Animals in the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, Jo Bogaerts (Lecturer in Literature, University of Antwerp) / 5. What is Distinctively Human? Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre on the Relation between Humans and Animals, Rob Compaijen and Michiel Meijer (PhD-candidates in Philosophy, University of Antwerp) / 6. Is it better to be a Human than a Lion?, Lantz Miller (Lecturer in Philosophy, CUNY) / PART II: Aspects of Human and Animal Nature / 7. Imagination - The Imagination of Animals, Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei (Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University; St. John’s College, University of Oxford) / 8. The Political Animal – Werewolves: A Reconsideration of Hobbes’s State of Nature from the Perspective of Biopolitics, Herbert De Vriese (Professor of Philosophy, University of Antwerp) / 9. The Historical Animal - The Human Being as Historical Animal: Dialectic and Polemics in Marx’s “The German Ideology” and Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morality”, Michael Begun and Lilian Cicerchia (PhD-candidates inPhilosophy, Fordham University) / 10. Shame - Shame in Front of the Cat? On Shame and the Other, Geoffrey Dierckxsens (Professor of Philosophy and PhD-candidate in Philosophy, University of Antwerp) / 11. Finitude - Being-toward-Meat: An Analytic of Human-Animal Finitude, Matthew Calarco (Associate Professor of Philosophy, California State University at Fullerton) / 12. Joy - Animal Joy: Towards Cat Phenomenology, Babette Babich (Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University) / Index
