Review of Philosophy & Animal Life

Environmental Philosophy, 2009

In the emerging field of animal studies, criticism turns to questions of ethics and animal rights by reading representations of nonhuman animals in philosophy and literature. A rhetoric of coming to terms often shapes such readings and points to a lack of satisfactory answers to two questions: why read nonhuman animals, and why now? These questions are crucial to animal studies but can only be answered by understanding this critical approach as an element of the anthropological discourse, fundamental to philosophy. Examining Aristotle's and Heidegger's approaches to thinking about the human-animal relation, it seems that the interest in reading how animals are presented in philosophy is not in coming to definitive terms with this relation or in correcting earlier theories. Rather, it appears to lie in reading the concept of the Animal as marking a limit of terminological language, and thus of theory. The Animal marks the point at which philosophy touches on poetry and withdraws. Criticism is concerned with animals now because the concept of "the animals" keeps casting doubt on theoretical conceptions of the Human and of human language.

Environmental Values, 1997

Contemporary ethical discourse on animals is influenced partly by a scientific and partly by an anthropomorphic understanding of them. Apparently, we have deprived ourselves of the possibility of a more profound acquaintance with them. In this contribution it is claimed that all ethical theories or statements regarding the moral significance of animals are grounded in an ontological assessment of the animal’s way of being. In the course of history, several answers have been put forward to the question of what animals really and basically are. Three of them (namely the animal as a machine, an organism and a being that dwells in an – apparently – restricted world) are discussed. It is argued that the latter (Heideggerian) answer contains a valuable starting point for an ethical reflection on recent changes in the moral relationship between humans and animals.

Phenomenology and the Non-Human Animal: At the Limits of Experience, 2007

As Max Horkheimer wrote sixty years ago, Modern insensitivity to nature is indeed only a variation of the pragmatic attitude that is typical of Western Civilization as a whole. Only the forms are different.

1999

Animal Others begins with a foreword by Tom Regan, who places the collection in a lineage with the seminal Animals, Men, and Morals (1971), the first anthology to deal in a serious philosophical manner with the moral status of animals. The earlier work reflected the Anglo-American ("Oxbridge") analytic training of its contributors, and Animal Others follows its lead with a parallel discussion of the moral status of animals from a continental philosophical perspective. Each of the essays contained in the volume was specifically written for it, and perhaps the plethora of voices from the perspective of Husserlian and post-Husserlian phenomenology reflects the research interests of the editor, H. Peter Steeves. Nevertheless, the book is a multidimensional inquiry into an important, heretofore little discussed, topic within the field of continental philosophy, and as such its publication is to be heralded. The essays in the volume might be roughly divided into (1) commentary and interpretation of philosophical arguments that either directly or implicitly contain references to the status of the animal, (2) applications or expansions of philosophical theories to the realm of nonhuman animal being, and (3) generally philosophical reflections on human relations with animals. The volume begins with an essay of the first type by David Wood, who charges Jacques Derrida with a disingenuous appeal to a deeply hidden humanism within his discussion of the treatment of the animal, and in particular within his critique of Martin Heidegger for the same clandestine humanistic presuppositions. Wood claims that the failure of Western philosophy to think animality critically is symptomatic of a wider failure in the philosophical project, namely, the human being's self-definition with respect to its perceived Other, whether that other, historically, be divine, non-Western, femi

Animal Umwelten in a Changing World

Philosophy has seldom had much of interest to say about living beings other than humans, and even there it steadfastly avoids anything that would smack of the biological, of the animal. There is a basic structure of how philosophers talk about animals. This basic structure expels animals from philosophy. Despite this, there is still room to tell stories about what an “animal gaze” at human theorisers would look like.

Hypatia Reviews Online

Thinking Animals is an exploration of the space between a theoretical rock and a hard place. Kari Weil's project engages the impasse between the modernist understanding of relations between animals and humans (with its attendant humanism) and the postmodern breakdown of categories like "animal" and "human" (and the resulting lack of guidance as to how to conduct relationships between these groups). Because the scope of these essays is so broad and encompasses so many issues, this review attempts to bring to light one of the many narratives encompassed by this book. The basic problem with which Thinking Animals grapples is this: On the one hand, humanism has provided us codes of behavior and ethics but only at the expense of elevating human importance above that of nonhuman animals. Modernism delineated the problem of our relationship to nonhuman animals by reinforcing a category of "we" who must behave ethically, and a category of "the other" to whom we do or do not behave in such a way. Modernism must treat the categories of human and animal as "real" so as to give force to moral requirements. Modernism, in other words, reinforces the idea of human exceptionalism.