Going beyond the creolisation theories of Brathwaite and Glissant, I attempt to develop ideas concerning the gendering of creolisation, and a historicising of affects within it. Addressing affects as ‘physiological things’ contextualised in the history of the Caribbean slave plantation, I seek, importantly, to delineate a trajectory and development of a specific Creole history in relation to affects. Brathwaite's proposition that ‘the most significant (and lasting) inter-cultural creolisation took place’ within the ‘intimate’ space of ‘sexual relations’ is key to my (...) argument. In the light of this, I consider how Creole cultural knowledge about affect—as the primary motivational system inclusive of fear, anger, outrage and so on — might be identified, and what constitutes such Creole knowledge within which affect might be embedded. How might Glissant's relationality and Creole literary texts add to this knowledge? I focus primarily on three texts: Clarke's The Polished Hoe, Collins’ The Colour of Forgetting and Morejón's ‘Amo a mi amo’/‘l Love My Master’. Each text on which I draw is selected for its intersectional representation of gender relations, ‘knowledge about sexual difference’ and its representation of Creole subjectivities within the context problematised here as the ‘demonic ground’. Moreover, as auto-theorising texts, they represent both narrative and meta-narrative of a creolising of affects in and against the economy of the slave plantation. Each represents also a stage or aspect of the development of subjectivities and an affective community that inform this intervention concerned with theorising against consolidated, universalising and Eurocentric conceptualisations of affect. In the process, I attempt to offer a differentiated cartography and literary archaeology of affect. (shrink)

This article, drawing on selected feminist magazines of the 1980s, particularly Feminist Arts News (FAN) and GEN, offers a textual ‘braiding’ of narratives to re-present a history of Black British feminism. I attempt to chart a history of Black British feminist inheritance while proposing the politics of (other)mothering as a politics of potential, pluralistic and democratic community building, where Black thought and everyday living carry a primary and participant role. The personal—mothering our children—is the political, affording a nurturing of alterity (...) through a politics of care that is fundamentally antiracist and antisexist. I attempt to show how Black feminist thought can significantly contribute to democracy in the present and how Black British history and thought, as fundamentally antiracist and anticolonial, can generate a reinvention much needed in the present of a shared British history. I argue for feminist intervention premised upon a politics of care, addressing through activist mothering the urgency of Black absence from prestigious institutions. Such debilitating absence in Britain inhibits the development of scholarship, distorts feminist history and seriously concerns potential Black feminists. From diverse texts, I develop a genealogical narrative supplemented through memory work. This ‘gathering and re-using’ privileges Black women's theorising as a crucial component of the methodological metissage, which includes auto-theorising to develop ideas of resemblance in relation to Black British feminism and feminist kinship. The resultant ‘braiding’, I suggest after Lionnet, questions the absence of intersubjective spaces for reflection on Black British feminist praxis, indicating a direction for British feminists of all complexions. Attentive to the 1980s as historical context while invoking the maternal, I consider what is required to engage generationally, counterwrite the academy and pursue a dynamic process of transformation within a transnational feminism that challenges Black British absence from academic knowledge production, while nurturing its presence. (shrink)

This study examines how people engage with the dynamic environment of the dog park in the face of unclear or ambiguous rules and emergent norms. Using participant observation, the analysis shows how, in the formal dog park, caretakers become “control managers” who must negotiate problems related to a variety of dog behaviors, especially mounting, aggression, and waste management. In this process, caretakers use various strategies to manage their own and others’ possible perceptions and understandings of appropriate behavior for dogs in (...) public places. (shrink)

This article is a summary of two chapters of a book published in French in 1997, entitled Comment L'esprit vient aux Bêtes, Paris, Gallimard. The core idea is that the crucial distinction between internal and external states, often used uncritically by theorists of intentionality, needs to be made on a non-circular basis. The proposal is that objectivity - the capacity to reidentify individuals as the same across places and times depends on the capacity to extract spatial crossmodal invariants, which in (...) turn presupposes a capacity to (re)calibrate perceptual inputs across modalities in a principled way. (shrink)

The construction and use of space is highly structuring in the lives of household members of both human and non-human animals. The choice of social practice is embedded in the ways in which both human and non-human animals physically organize the world around them. The architectural vestiges of houses—both in terms of the distribution of material culture within and surrounding them, and architectural choices—provide frameworks for a social practice that was shared between humans and living, domestic animals, or animal (...) materiality. The notion of meeting points is explored via both its tangible and metaphorical aspects to approach the meetings—the physical performances and their significance—of humans and animals in the past. To gauge the potential likenesses and differences, two case studies are compared from the Late Bronze Age in Scandinavia and Early Iron Age in Sicily. Both case studies represent societies where domestic animals were present and formed part of the household subsistence. A framework is presented that takes into consideration the spatial potential of allowing human-animal relationships to unfold within the framework of the everyday social practice of the household. (shrink)

I defend the view that we should not overintellectualize the mind. Nonhuman animals can occupy islands of practical rationality: they can have contextbound reasons for action even though they lack full conceptual abilities. Holism and the possibility of mistake are required for such reasons to be the agent's reasons, but these requirements can be met in the absence of inferential promiscuity. Empirical work with animals is used to illustrate the possibility that reasons for action could be bound to symbolic or (...) social contexts, and connections are made to simulationist accounts of cognitive skills. (shrink)

Hurley is right to reject the dichotomy between intentional agents and mere stimulus/response habit machines, and she is also right in thinking that it is important to map the space of systems for the adaptive control of behaviour. So there is much in this paper with which I agree. My disagreement concerns folk psychology. Hurley thinks that control space can be charted by asking whether and to what extent animals are intentional agents. In contrast, I doubt that the concepts of (...) folk psychology, especially folk psychology construed as an interpretative practice, are the right mapping tools. If the main function of folk psychology is to make sense of one another, coordinate joint action, or make decisions about moral and legal responsibility, then there is no point in applying folk psychological notions to nonhuman minds. These interpretative functions simply do not arise for our interaction with nonhuman minds, and if folk psychology serves largely as a social tool serving them, there is no need to apply it to nonhumans, nor is there a reasonable expectation that we can usefully do so. If folk psychology does not even carve our sensing and control mechanisms at the joints, if it is not a good theory of human cognitive architecture, then it is not likely to be wellsuited for describing those of nonhuman agents. (shrink)

A study of the organization of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) rituals in time and space illuminates a postulated mechanism on shifting focus in action parsing, from mid-ranged actions to finer movements (gestures). Performance of OCD rituals also involves high concentration rather than the automated, less attended performance of rituals in normal and stereotyped behaviors in animals and humans. (Published Online February 8 2007).

The phenomenology of home requires a differing notion of embodiment, perception, space/time, imagination, and animality. Home is in lived space, a deep psychic structure, and a dialogue with built structures and the natural world. Home requires cultivation that can increase our sense of belonging, shelter, direction and purpose. Home shows us trajectories of the back and forth dialogue with the inanimate world, deep past, ancestors, qualities of the things, animals and the natural world. Home is key to dwelling in space (...) in a centered way and appropriating the deep past. The meaning of home can lead to social efforts at providing homes and deepening ecological and historical awareness. (shrink)

In the evolving field of advanced biopreservation technologies, the development of suspended animation (SA) is inspired by real-world challenges. In the context of space exploration, SA is seen as a solution to enable humans to undertake missions far beyond low Earth orbit, including routine travel to other planets in our solar system and beyond. While work on the socio-ethical and legal implications (ELSI) of space exploration continues to evolve, NASA has committed to make ethics a priority issue, making this a (...) fruitful field for further examination. (shrink)

Landmarks play a crucial role in bootstrapping both spatial and temporal cognition. Given the similarity in the underlying demands of representing spatial and temporal relations, we ask here whether animals can be trained to reason about temporal relations by providing them with temporal landmark cues, proposing a line of future research complementary to those suggested by the authors.

In recent years, with the development of society and the rapid development of the animation industry, people are paying more and more attention to and requirements for animation production. As an indispensable part of animation production, picture composition plays a major role in animation production. It can give full play to the application of color matching and light and shadow design and enhance the depth and space of the animation screen. Tone space conversion refers to the conversion or representation of (...) color data in one color space into corresponding data in another color space. Its purpose is to distinguish and process color components such as hue and saturation in an image. This article first introduces the domestic and foreign research status of digital image preprocessing and analyzes the basic principles of several color space conversions in detail. Then, several color space conversion algorithms are studied, and the performance of the algorithms is compared and analyzed. The paper focuses on the hardware implementation and optimization of the algorithm for converting RGB color space into HSI color space to meet the real-time requirements. This article focuses on the mutual conversion between the RGB tone space and the HSI tone space and describes in detail how each color component in the HSI tone space is converted from the three RGB color components from a geometric perspective, and then the conversion is derived, and several general conversion methods of RGB to HSI tone space are introduced; two conversion methods of geometric derivation method and standard modulus algorithm are implemented in the software, and the comparison verification is carried out, and the comparison is made from the perspective of hardware implementation. The pros and cons of the two methods are discussed. Finally, the paper summarizes the shortcomings in the design and proposes further research directions in the future. (shrink)

My commentary on Hurley is concerned with foundational issues. Hurley's investigation of animal cognition is cast within a particular framework—basically, a philosophically refined version of folk psychology. Her discussion has a complicated relationship to unresolved debates about the nature and status of folk psychology, especially debates about the extent to which folk psychological categories are aimed at picking out features of the causal organization of the mind.

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While differentialists deny that non-linguistic animals can have a sense of justice, assimilationists credit some animals with such an advanced moral attitude. We approach this debate from a philosophical perspective. First, we outline the history of the notion of justice in philosophy and how various facets of that notion play a role in contemporary empirical investigations of justice among humans. On this basis, we develop a scheme for the elements of justice-relevant situations and for criteria of justice that should be (...) fruitful in studying both humans and animals. Furthermore, we investigate the conceptual connections between a sense of justice, on the one hand, and various other mental powers, on the other, and indicate which of the latter may be beyond the ken of animals. Next, we consider recent empirical research on justicerelated phenomena in animals. We argue for an intermediate position: While animals can at least in principle satisfy some preconditions of justice (intentional action, rulefollowing), others are problematic, notably possessing a notion of desert. A space for justice in social animals exists, yet it is rather limited compared to the rich cultures of justice in humans. Finally, we reflect on some actual or alleged implications of research on animal justice. As regards justice in humans, one should avoid a simplistic image of ‘‘natural justice’’ as boiling down to equal allocation of goods. As regards justice for animals, one should be weary of the contractualist assumption that only those capable of justice themselves are deserving of ‘‘just’’ treatment. (shrink)

In a surface-dwelling animal like the rat, experimental strategies for investigating the hippocampal correlates of three-dimensional space appear inevitably complicated by the interplay of global versus local reference frames. We discuss the impact of the resulting confounds on present and future empirical analysis of the hypothesis by Jeffery and colleagues.

Sociology and Animals : Beginnings -- Animals and Biology as Destiny -- Animals, Social Inequalities and Oppression -- Animals, Crime and Abuse -- Town and Country : Animals, Space and Place -- Consumption of the Animal -- Animals, Leisure and Culture -- Animal Experiments and Animal Rights -- Conclusion: Sociology for Other Animals.

ZusammenfassungTrotz seiner großen Verbreitung in den Lebenswissenschaften wurde dem Aquarium bisher wenig wissenschafts- und technikhistorische Aufmerksamkeit zuteil. Dies ist nicht zuletzt durch den Umstand begründet, dass das Aquarium und seine Geschichte bisher größtenteils als außerwissenschaftlich aufgefasst wurden. Dabei spielen so unterschiedliche Kontexte wie Akklimatisierung, Amateurnaturkunde und bürgerliche Populärkultur eine wichtige Rolle. Gleichzeitig ist die Entwicklung des Aquariums aber auch eng mit der Geschichte der Lebenswissenschaften verbunden. Mit Blick auf die zweite Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts verstehe ich das Aquarium als techno-natural (...) assemblage, in der Technologie, Kultur und Natur zu einem künstlichen Naturraum verbunden sind. Seine Geschichte beginnt in der britischen Amateurnaturkunde und der französischen Akklimatisierungsbewegung. Im Deutschland des späten 19. Jahrhunderts entwickelte sich das Aquarium zu einem Massenphänomen. Gleichzeitig hielt es Einzug in die Lebenswissenschaften, wo es als Einfallstor, Instrument und Umwelt Verwendung fand. Wie sich zeigt, ist das Aquarium eine hochgradig konstruierte Technologie, die sich aus einer Verbindung unterschiedlicher Traditionen herausgebildet und das Leben in die Lebenswissenschaften gebracht hat. (shrink)

Over the course of the twentieth century, the number of productive nonhuman animals in Australian cities declined dramatically. This decline resulted—at least in part—from an imaginative geography, in which productive animals were deemed inappropriate occupants of urban spaces. A class-based prioritization of amenity, privacy, order, and the protection of real property values—as well as a gender order within which animal-keeping was not recognized as a legitimate economic activity for women—shaped this imaginative geography of animals that found its most (...) critical expression in local government regulations. However, there were different imaginative geographies among women and men—mostly those from the working class—whose emotional and economic relationships with productive animals led them to advocate for those animals as legitimate and desirable urban inhabitants. (shrink)

Many theorists of the ‘political turn’ in animal rights theory emphasize the need for animals’ interests to be considered in political decision-making processes, but deny that this requires self-representation and participation by animals themselves. I argue that participation by domesticated animals in co-authoring our shared world is indeed required, and explore two ways to proceed: 1) by enabling animal voice within the existing geography of human-animal roles and relationships; and 2) by freeing animals into a revitalized public (...) commons where citizens encounter one another in spontaneous, unpredictable encounters in spaces that they can re-shape together. (shrink)

What is the relationship between space and time in the human mind? Studies in adults show an asymmetric relationship between mental representations of these basic dimensions of experience: Representations of time depend on space more than representations of space depend on time. Here we investigated the relationship between space and time in the developing mind. Native Greek‐speaking children watched movies of two animals traveling along parallel paths for different distances or durations and judged the spatial and temporal aspects of these (...) events (e.g., Which animal went for a longer distance, or a longer time?). Results showed a reliable cross‐dimensional asymmetry. For the same stimuli, spatial information influenced temporal judgments more than temporal information influenced spatial judgments. This pattern was robust to variations in the age of the participants and the type of linguistic framing used to elicit responses. This finding demonstrates a continuity between space‐time representations in children and adults, and informs theories of analog magnitude representation. (shrink)

This meta-study applies a socio-semiotic framework combining five basic communicational aspects, form, content, act, time, and space, developed to help answering the questionCan animals refer?It further operates with four levels, sign, utterance, genre, and lifeworld, studying relations between utterance and genre in particular. Semantic key terms found in an excerpted ‘resource collection’ consisting of three anthologies, two academic journals, and a monography, studying content in animal communication, are inspected, and discussed, especially information, functional reference, and reference. Since a temporary (...) inspection concluded that the field seems unable to give convincing joint answers, the scope of the meta-study was extended to include critical investigations of implicit communicational epistemologies applied in the sources. Two major challenges were brought to surface. Firstly, the problem of conflicting interrelatedness in animal utterances (parts versus whole). Positioning analyses revealed that theories and project-designs were mostly dyadic, prioritising form/content, content/function, or function/form, and rarely form/content/function, as a whole. The second concerned the issue of functional openness of animal communication systems. The meta-study found that more recent studies tend to reduce an essentialist search for ‘clear’ categories in favor of more complex designs, where focus is less on references in utterances as such and more on a species’ communicational system. This shift in turn leads to a problematisation of the role of context, kinds of communication (life-genres) and semantic levels in animal utterances, in other words, on animal communication for particular species as a whole. (shrink)

This book aims to develop an account of living together with difference which recognises the tension that we are inescapably with others - both human and non-human - but at the same time are always differing from and with those with whom we find ourselves. A concern for coexistence and questions over how we might live together have been raised and approached from a host of conceptual starting points in recent times, including via calls for a rethinking of communism today, (...) the articulation of forms of 'cosmopolitics' or 'pluralism', the re-figuring of understandings of ecology as dark or feminist, amongst others. This book responds to such questions of coexistence by developing what it calls a 'co-existential analytic'. In doing so, this book introduces a range of post-phenomenological thought which offers means for thinking about such questions of living together with difference. The thought of Emanuel Levinas on the face of the other, Jean-Luc Nancy on being as being-with, Roberto Esposito on the munis, and Michel Henry on pathic auto-affection are introduced and critically reflected upon in terms of what they offer for thinking about such coexistence. Alongside these conceptual starting points, a series of encounters - with cinema, everyday life, politics, and literature - are used to animate and illustration the discussion. Ultimately, the book argues for a 'spacing' of subjectivities with that world and those encountered within it. This book is intended primarily for researchers and postgraduate students interested in questions of identity, difference, and subjectivity. It will be of interest to those in the fields of social and cultural geography, sociology, social theory, and cultural studies. (shrink)

The attempt to appropriate Heidegger’s thinking in order to found environmental ethics continues to pose challenges both for understanding the premise of an ethic, and, conversely, for unfolding the importance of his thought in the effort to displace the anthropocentric focus of modern philosophy. These challenges must be taken up on a methodological as well as a thematic level, in order to show how a claim of being can implicate a reciprocal guidance pertaining to our treatment of the earth, nature, (...) and animals. An appeal to the ethos of situated dwelling is not sufficient to ground a transhuman ethic; rather, a precursory step must be taken to uncover a common space of embodiment, thereby marking a jointure whereby habitats fostering the potential for animals to “flourish” can be cultivated in concert with our own capacity to dwell. When viewed through this prism of our “incarnality,” the stewardship that we practice in dwelling on the earth can also “formally indicate” a sense of proportionality, e.g., a “measure,” counter balancing the interests of animals with humans. Conversely, the search for a trans-human ethic calls for a further transformation of phenomenology through its interface with hermeneutics. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to show that in Merleau-Ponty’s lesser known works, one can find a path leading toward a phenomenology of the body that would not risk the “ambiguity of the flesh,” as The Visible and the Invisible is often charged with, but instead would sustain the ontology of nature that one finds in the “Working Notes” added to Merleau-Ponty’s last writings. Analyzing first his concept of nature, as it was developed in his courses at the Collège (...) de France, the proposed aim of this text is to question anthropological difference by focusing on Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the contemporary sciences, whereby the Ineinander between the physical, living, and human orders is re-founded by a new, negative concept of nature. By deconstructing classical ontology and its understanding of space, time, and objectivity, and by returning to the domain of perception, this new concept offers a novel way to reveal the advent of life in nature, its institution, and the emergence of a new corporeity in life itself. The model of Merleau-Ponty’s essential concept of institution becomes birth, and therefore the human body will no longer be interpreted as “one’s own body,” but rather will be understood, in a radically a-subjective way, as from, and based on, the participation of our perception with animality. Thereby, the concept of “ownness” becomes secondary; however, the notion of institution, established against the lexicon of consciousness and subjectivity, opens another sense of anthropological difference, one that is based only on the experiences of corporeity. (shrink)

The size of animal exhibits has important effects on their lives and welfare. However, most references to exhibit size only consider floor space and height dimensions, without considering the space afforded by usable features within the exhibit. In this paper, we develop two possible methods for measuring the usable space of zoo exhibits and apply these to a sample exhibit. Having a metric for usable space in place will provide a better reflection of the quality of different exhibits, and (...) enhance comparisons between exhibits. (shrink)

From 1957 to 1973, Barcelona Zoo was transformed from a small-scale, antiquated establishment harboring very few animals, a place that was still in a poor condition following the Spanish Civil War, into a new, larger, modern, and internationally recognized institution that included up-to-date animal enclosures and that boasted one of the first dolphinariums in Europe, as well as a famous white gorilla as its icon. From its very beginning, this renovation involved an intense popularization campaign. In this paper, by (...) describing the public discourse generated throughout this transformation and by analyzing the roles played by Antoni Jonch, the director of the zoo at that time; Josep Maria de Porcioles, the then-mayor of Barcelona; and General Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator who was head of state during this period, I will highlight how the context of the dictatorship not only authorized the new Barcelona Zoo but is, in fact, crucial to its understanding. The narratives that surrounded the renovation of the zoo focused on its civic and educational purpose, with a firm emphasis on modernity. The zoo was a modern space for learning about animals in order to become better people. These narratives were not only suitable to the policies, ideas, and aims of Porcioles’ City Council and Franco’s dictatorial regime; in fact, they completely matched them. Both local and national governments benefited from the restructuring of Barcelona Zoo and from its public discourse as a tool for social control and an instrument for their own propaganda, legitimation, and perpetuation. (shrink)

The neuropsychopharmacological methods and theories used to investigate the nature of depression have been viewed as suspect for a variety of philosophical and scientific reasons. Much of this criticism aims to demonstrate that biochemical- and neurological-based theories of this mental illness are defective, due in part because the methods used in their service are consistently invalidated, failing to induce depression in pre-clinical animal models. Neuropsychopharmacologists have been able to stave off such criticism by showing that their methods are context (...) and domain-sensitive, and that the worth of an animal model is relative to its purpose – thereby creating logical space for the question of whether there could ever be a “good” animal model of depression. I contend that this sort of response implicitly leans on Feyerabendian principles in the philosophy of science, and exemplify this connection using a standard taxonomy of behavioral models of depression. I then take one central Feyerabendian principle – methodological and theoretical pluralism – and show how it maps onto the neuropsychopharmacological research tradition as it is currently practiced. (shrink)

Despite the many contributions of nonhuman animals in history, nonhuman animal representations are seldom crafted with care and accuracy in curricular texts. Because of the anthropocentric vantage point of textbook creation, the nonhuman animal is often portrayed as an object, but as our relationship with the nonhuman world continues to deteriorate, we need now more than ever to consider the agency and subjectivity of nonhuman entities across time and space. In this article, I will use critical contextual analysis (...) as a research method to examine the representation of the horse in a commonly used textbook in middle and high schools in the United States titled World History: Patterns of Interaction to raise larger questions about how to engage with nonhuman animal presence in history with students. Using critical animal studies as a theoretical framework to illuminate the data, the findings reveal that the horse is depicted as agentless and is shown merely as a means for human animals to expand empire and perpetuate social norms. The exploration identifies a gap in the social studies scholarship that neglects the historical contributions of nonhuman animals in curriculum. This article will argue that juxtaposing anthropocentric curricular texts such as the one under investigation with narratives that illuminate nonhuman animal subjectivity is essential for building a more empathetic world and for cultivating a more inclusive historical narrative. (shrink)

Human beings are both needy and dignified. How should we think about the relationship between our neediness and our worth? Card argues well that our vulnerability to luck is intertwined in the very conditions of moral agency. We can see the merit of her approach even more clearly by turning to some difficulties the Stoics have in preserving dignity while removing vulnerability. Stoicism does, however, help us to sort through the difficulties involved as we try to combine love of particular (...) people with respect for all human life. Richardson is correct to suggest that love itself can animate the concern for all humanity; I also agree with him that institutions must play a major role in any solution to problems of inequality between nations. Although the “capabilities approach” offers an attractive account of one part of the goal of just political institutions, combining, as Moody‐Adams suggests, respect for difference with a commitment to universal norms, I now believe that the capabilities account should be combined with a form of Rawlsian political liberalism that protects spaces within which citizens may pursue the good as they understand it. (shrink)

In his temporal philosophy based on the writing of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze describes duration ( durée ) as a becoming that endures in time. Reifications of this complex philosophical concept become artistically expressed, I argue, in the form and content of South African artist William Kentridge's series of 'charcoal drawings for projection.' These exhibited art works provide intriguing and illuminating 'philosophical' examples of animated audio-visual media, which expressively plicate distinct images of movement and time. The composition of Kentridge's films (...) at once illuminate a regime of animated 'movement-images' that can trace their aetiological roots to classical forms of film and animation, whilst concurrently folding in complex philosophical expressions of time as duration which invoke the crystalline 'time-image' concepts of philosophers such as Bergson and Deleuze, as well as literary authors like Marcel Proust. Over and above these co-existent regimes of movement and time, Kentridge's artistic technique and exhibition practices further expose a multifarious 'geology' of other embedded time lines that serve to enrich/complicate these temporal expressions. I argue here that diegetic time- and movement-images ostensibly co-exist alongside different 'archaeologies' of time relevant to the context and creation of the artworks. For this reason, the animated drawings formulate intriguing artistic/philosophical expressions that muse on the nature of matter, memory, time and space. (shrink)

This chapter proposes that encountering the Other through the face can be conditioned by social and built technologies. In “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” Emmanuel Levinas relates his experience as a prisoner of war, held in a forced-labor camp in Nazi Germany. He contrasts being denied his humanity by other humans, “called free” (DF, 152), while being recognized as human—indeed as a friend—by a dog the prisoners named Bobby. The episode suggests that though the concept of the (...) face applies to humans, the face is not enough for facing, at least not in the setting of the camp. By contrast, the prisoners seem able to face and be faced by Bobby, even if Levinas remains inconclusive about whether the face applies to animals elsewhere. It follows that the face is operating less like a property, and more like a capacity, a mode as Levinas calls it. But what conditions encountering an Other in this mode? If the face is neither sufficient for facing, nor prior to it, then what conditions facing (or effacing)? I propose that social structures, techniques, architectures, professional roles, and so on matter in coming to face (or efface) the Other. I conclude this from analyzing human-animal encounters in a scientific space of exception: the animal lab. Building on empirical accounts of animal research, I propose that animal research is populated by what I call “technologies of effacement.” These include: (1) built architectures; (2) entering and exit procedures; (3) protective garments and equipment; (4) identification and labeling techniques; and (5) experimental protocols. These technologies serve other manifest ends, but they operate to condition encounters between humans and animals in the lab: they help block the face of humans and animals. (shrink)

Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage is a radical postmodern retelling of the biblical flood narrative, offering an invitation to empathy as well as a dark indictment of tyrannic religious structures. Findley begins by establishing a space of empathy with (and openness to) the experiences of animals and other marginalized groups within the context of religiously backed oppression. From that space of empathy, he leads an examination of the structure of religious tyranny, specifically contrasting a tyrannic response to ambiguity (...) (fear and rigidity) with an antityrannic response (curiosity and openness) in the realm of animal-human distinction. (shrink)

Although long treated as the human space par excellence, the city is in fact a vibrant ecosystem that is home to many more nonhuman animals than human ones. Nonetheless, the longstanding emphasis on the city as human built environment and human center of culture has occluded extensive study of it as a thriving ecosystem in its own right. Ethology offers valuable tools for conducting a serious study of the zoological dimensions of urban areas. Companion and domestic animals such as dogs (...) and cats share domestic spaces. Synanthropes such as crows, raccoons, and coyotes are able to easily take advantage of areas around humans. And animals labeled as “pests,” such as rats and roaches, thrive in human buildings and on refuse. Indeed, such animals even play a key role in converting organic matter in the city and preventing its buildup. (shrink)

Cimatti and Salzani have put together a rich collection of essays on animal studies that provides an exhaustive overview of how Italian contemporary philosophers are engaging with animal ethics, antispeciesism, posthumanism, ecofeminism, and biopolitics. This edited volume represents an important development in the “animal turn” in the humanities, particularly because it is published in English, allowing for a more efficient dialogue between “Italian theory” and philosophers around the world. This is, in fact, the first collection that will (...) give an international audience access to the rich and varied contribution of Italian contemporary philosophy in the burgeoning field of animal studies. It is also important to point out that all the authors—who are either well-established erudite thinkers or bright and innovative new voices in the panorama of Italian philosophy—effectively engage with recent and prominent scholarship in the fields of animal studies, posthumanism, and biopolitics, such as the work of Zizek, Esposito, Hardt, Calarco, Braidotti, and Wolfe.The volume is clearly intended for an academic audience: professors, scholars, and graduate students studying not only philosophy, Italian studies, environmental humanities, and animal ethics, but also political science, ethology, comparative literature, art history, and religious studies. In addition, the book could also find an audience in animal rights and environmental activists who are interested in the philosophical aspects and ethical and political implications of their actions.The division of the book into three sections (“Animality in the Italian Tradition,” “Animality in Perspective,” and “Fragments of a Contemporary Debate”) provides the reader a clear trajectory from the Italian philosophical tradition to the current debate on “animality.” In the first section, in fact, the authors engage with the rich and complex tradition of both Italian animal philosophy and advocacy. In the three essays that make up this section, the authors provide a compelling historical perspective of the anti-Cartesian and antidualistic aspects of Italian thought, tracing its pre-Cartesian origin and post-Cartesian developments through the work of Francis of Assisi, Dante Alighieri, Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Vico, and Giacomo Leopardi, among others. This section also includes essays outlining the development of animal bioethics in Italy, which emerged from the work of animal advocacy pioneer Aldo Capitini and continued to have an important impact on Italian culture thanks to the antispeciesist movement and debate, of which the third essay of this section provides an exhaustive intellectual history.The second section of the volume, comprised of six essays, provides an overall view of the ongoing philosophical debate on animality that traverses Italian posthumanism, feminism, theology, biopolitics, environmental ethics, and Marxist thought. Here the authors engage with some of the prominent voices in the contemporary Italian philosophical landscape, such as Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Roberto Marchesini, Antonio Negri, Maria Turchetto, Adriana Caravero, Luisa Muraro, and Paolo De Benedetti. As pointed out by the editors in their introduction, this section does not intend to offer a complete account of the extensive and heterogenous exchanges occurring inside the Italian biological turn, but instead aims at investigating its most compelling approaches and effectively links them to the ongoing transnational debate.The rich historiography and analysis of the first two sections is complemented, in the third section of the volume, by the speculative approach that strongly characterizes all five final essays. Here we can find some of the most exciting and original developments in Italian scholarship on animal philosophy. This section is, therefore, the most effective in presenting the distinctive approach of contemporary Italian philosophers in rethinking animality and the human-animal interplay, in particular inside the historical and epistemological frame of the Anthropocene. For instance, Massimo Filippi explores how slaughterhouses have become exemplary spaces to investigate the calculation that adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides humans and animals, which removes animality and excises the other, which forcefully bans any imagining of the monstrously other, of the other-than-human, and that produces, among others and besides It-Self, the Woman, the Homosexual, the Abnormal, the Migrant, the Criminal, and the Animal. (p. 225)Structuring his argument on the real and metaphorical “mathematics of sacrifice” at work in the slaughterhouse (p. 226), Filippi engages with the processes that enable human ontological privilege, with intraspecific and interspecific mechanisms of discrimination, and with philosophical, political, and ethical implications of meat production.For a second and final example, ethologist Roberto Marchesini—one of the most original and prominent voices in animal studies—focuses on redefining the paradigm of “animality.” In his essay, Marchesini questions behaviorism and the automatism of learning, key aspects that have been prominent in defining animality in many fields, from biology to philosophy. Building from his groundbreaking and extensive work in ethology and zooanthropology, he argues for an “elaborative model” of animality (animal as subject) against the fallacy of the “automatism-based model” (animal as mechanism): Subjectivity is the implicit condition of the animal being, an expressive dimension that may also be unconscious but that precedes from (i) a constructivist conception of behavior, which we could explain by considering it a work in progress, always open and never predetermined, but equally never imposed and nonetheless always co-factorial to external contributions, and (ii) a propositional view of the individual, or rather from being supported by verbal structures such as to delight, to fear, to want, which join themselves to modal predicates declined according to context, but which likewise render the individual the protagonist. (p. 247)Animal studies has established itself as one of the most exciting areas of research inside the biological turn of the humanities worldwide and, by collecting such a large number of compelling and provocative theories from Italian contemporary philosophy, the impact of Cimatti and Salzani's volume will be twofold: It will enrich and expand a developing discussion in the environmental humanities and in animal studies while establishing the centrality of Italian thought in such an important and, in the Anthropocene era, necessary debate. (shrink)

The posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is the most likely site where egocentric spatial relationships are represented in the brain. PPC cells receive visual, auditory, somaesthetic, and vestibular sensory inputs; oculomotor, head, limb, and body motor signals; and strong motivational projections from the limbic system. Their discharge increases not only when an animal moves towards a sensory target, but also when it directs its attention to it. PPC lesions have the opposite effect: sensory inattention and neglect. The PPC does not (...) seem to contain a “map” of the location of objects in space but a distributed neural network for transforming one set of sensory vectors into other sensory reference frames or into various motor coordinate systems. Which set of transformation rules is used probably depends on attention, which selectively enhances the synapses needed for making a particular sensory comparison or aiming a particular movement. (shrink)

When entering an environment, animals – including humans – tend to consult their memories to determine what they know about the place. This information is useful to determine: is this place safe? And what happens next? In this chapter, we argue on both empirical and conceptual grounds that memory is largely organized by space. Spatial relations determine what is recalled and which experiences are combined in generalizations. Time does not play an analogous role. We show that space and time in (...) memory are thus deeply asymmetrical. We conclude with a consequence of our view: spatial organization entails a basic form of abstraction in a way temporal organization does not, and so the spatial organization of memory reveals that memory involves generalization from the very beginning. (shrink)

Colleen Glenney Boggs puts animal representation at the center of the making of the liberal American subject. Concentrating on the formative and disruptive presence of animals in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson, Boggs argues that animals are critical to the ways in which Americans enact their humanity and regulate subjects in the biopolitical state. Biopower, or a politics that extends its reach to life, thrives on the strategic ambivalence between who is considered human (...) and what is judged as animal. It generates a space of indeterminacy in which animal representations intervene to define and challenge the parameters of subjectivity. The renegotiation of the species line produces a tension that is never fully regulated. Therefore, as both figures of radical alterity and the embodiment of biopolitics, animals are simultaneously exceptional and exemplary to the biopolitical state. An original contribution to animal studies, American studies, critical race theory, and posthumanist inquiry, Boggs thrillingly reinterprets a long and highly contentious human-animal history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.1 (2005) 59-61 [Access article in PDF] Space and Normativity Jennifer Church Keywords space, normativity, reasons, unconscious I appreciate the thoughtful criticisms and helpful suggestions of my commentators. In this brief reply, I can only begin to address the many interesting issues that they raise.I am not sure whether R.D. Hinshelwood views my paper as operating within the constraints of analytic philosophy, which he equates (...) with "rationalist" philosophy and traces back to Aristotle, or as moving beyond those boundaries. Three initial remarks may help to situate my position. (1) My paper is in the analytic tradition insofar as it is an attempt to articulate the constitutive structure of concepts that are especially interesting and fundamental, where such articulation may or may not lead to conceptual revision. (2) My particular focus is on the concept of reason, with the aim of thinking through its appropriate use with respect to unconscious thought and the emotions; implicit in this project is the assumption that there are some things that should not be explained by appeal to reasons. (3) I wish to show how some peculiarities surrounding the attribution of unconscious reasons and emotional reasons can be understood by reference to spatial reasoning rather than reasoning that is more linguistic in character.Hinshelwood sympathizes with my attempt to describe a kind of reasoning that is not "rationalist" insofar as it does not rely on the manipulation of symbols and, indeed, tends to ignore the distinction between symbol and thing. He agrees that there is something spatial about such ways of reasoning. But Hinshelwood argues that more needs to be said to establish a connection between the spatial maneuverings of animals and the nonpropositional thinking of humans. He thinks that "psychoanalysis can in effect fill in the gap in Church's argument with a developmental argument" (2005, 47). The developmental account he has in mind is based on Freud's description of how an infant who automatically tries to ingest what feels good and excrete what feels bad will also come to introject (i.e., to imagine ingesting) what seems good and eject (i.e., imagine excreting) what seems bad. In the words of Hinshelwood, this is a hypothesis about how "bodily space becomes psychic space, and emerges in the sense of having a mind" (2005, 47). I am sympathetic to this account of how we acquire a sense of having a mind, but I do not think that we need to have a sense of having a mind in order to have a mind. A cat can have beliefs and desires (and can have the normative experience of having taken the wrong turn) without ever imagining an inner space with mental contents. Likewise, a cat can experience anger or fear in virtue of experiencing certain changes within its body despite having no experience of its mind as such. In short, I view an account of introjection as an important contribution to developmental psychology, but I think it comes [End Page 59] after, not before, an account of unconscious and emotional reasons.Gerrit Glas maintains that my attempt to ground the normativity of unconscious reasoning (or spatial reasoning) in the feeling of 'getting it right' versus getting it wrong' runs afoul of this dilemma: either (a) the normativity of unconscious reasoning ends up very much like the normativity of conscious reasoning, and the needed normativity is already built into the feeling that I appeal to, or (b) the normativity of unconscious reasoning is reduced to physical sensations and is no longer normative at all. I do not view this as a dilemma because I embrace option (a). I agree that the feel of being on the right track is much the same, whether or not we can say what that track is, let alone why it is right rather than wrong. Likewise, it feels the same to realize that I have made a wrong turn, whether or not I know what the wrong turn was. Also, I agree that normativity is implicit in the feel of getting it right. I am not appealing to such a feeling... (shrink)

In comparing humans and animals, we may use humans as the standard to measure animals, or conversely, animals as the standard to measure humans. While most philosophers have adopted the former approach, David Hume is among those few who use the comparison with animals as means to throw light on human nature. I focus on Hume’s treatment of human and animal reason. The cognitive processes and states that Hume holds to be common to humans and animals may be called (...) situated, that is, embedded in the process of guiding actions that is actually going on and consequently relative to the agent’s current position in space-time. Hume’s treatment of causal reasoning underlines the centrality of situated cognition in the workings of human, as well as animal minds. Taking situated reasoning and beliefs as the paradigm of human cognition enables us to look from an alternative point of view, at the features supposedly unique to human cognition, like the use of general words and concepts. Thus we can find a confirmation of the practical import of general words and concepts in Hume’s account of the obligation of promises, where words play an essential role in extending our control over objects and actions beyond what is present and particular into what is absent or not yet actualized. This is also a confirmation of how deeply our cognitive abilities in general are rooted in our practical needs. (shrink)

Political decision-makers in the European Union are currently discussing the introduction of a mandatory uniform labelling scheme for meat and milk that provides information on husbandry systems similar to the already existent labelling scheme in the EU egg market. The objective of this paper was to assess whether such information is relevant to consumers when buying meat and milk. The paper was based on a systematic synthesis of 53 scientific journal articles on empirical consumer studies. The review revealed that consumers (...) perceived the aspects of outdoor access, stocking density and floor type as important factors influencing animal welfare. On average, consumers not only had a positive attitude towards more animal welfare-friendly husbandry systems with outdoor access and space allowance but were also willing to pay a price premium for products from such systems. All studies on consumer segmentation identified at least one consumer segment that placed great importance on animal welfare-friendly husbandry systems. Interestingly, many studies identified one or more other segments who still had a significant preference for animal welfare-friendly products even though other product attributes were more important to them. Based on the findings, the paper presents conclusions regarding the labelling of husbandry systems for meat and milk. (shrink)

Our hypothesis is that ecological transformation involves socio-environmental communities formed through joint action on a material environment, which can be set as a conjonction of practices between senses and meanings — giving birth to landscapes, life environments and matter of all kinds — analyzed in the context of solidarities — as well as conflicts of territoriality, in which human collectives associate with living matter and the environment to fight against other uses of space or to implement new ways of seeing (...) nature. The environment as a collective work then becomes a self-sustaining call to action, which enhances the skills and legitimacy of the actors (citizens, formal and informal collectives) and their role in socio-ecological transition. We thus witness emerging environmental citizenships of a new kind that deviate from political militancy and testify to civic engagement in ordinary practices, a collective environmentalism that contributes to public action and democracy. What we call ordinary environmentalism includes environmental alliances and socio-environmental communities (with cats and cockroaches, mushrooms and noise interpretation, narrating, creating music, etc.) that have hitherto been considered negligible and we emphasize their value in democratizing the co-production of everyday and ordinary environments. One way to do this is to admit – as many scholars in the field of biosemiotics have done – that nature is made up of « signs, interpretations and meanings » (Wheeler 2014: 375) and to increase our knowledge of an aesthetic experience related to nature. We will deploy these issues on a theoretical level through the conceptual expression of environmental forms and the concept of immunity. Based on an interdisciplinary research, the related fieldwork includes a hundred non-directive interviews and observations conducted in several French cities (Paris, Rennes, Lyon), in specific neighborhoods such as the public housing district of Blosne in Rennes and the Croix-Rousse district in Lyon, or with specific associations to reflect the role of public institutions in the socio-natural arrangements of groups of inhabitants in the cities of France. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to present a model of causal relations that is based on what is known about human causal reasoning and that forms guidelines for implementations in robots. I argue for two theses concerning human cognition. The first is that human causal cognition, in contrast to that of other animals, is based on the understanding of the forces that are involved. The second thesis is that humans think about causality in terms of events. I present a (...) two-vector model of events, developed by Gärdenfors and Warglien, which states that an event is represented in terms of two main components – the force of an action that drives the event, and the result of its application. Apart from the causal mapping, the event model contains representations of a patient, an agent, and possibly some other roles. Agents and patients are objects (animate or inanimate) that have different properties. Following my theory of conceptual spaces, they can be described as vectors of property values. At least two spaces are needed to describe an event, an action space and a result space. The result of an event is modeled as a vector representing the change of properties of the patient before and after the event. In robotics the focus has been on describing results. The proposed model also includes the causal part of events, typically described as an action. A central part of an event category is the mapping from actions to results. This mapping contains the central information about causal relations. In applications of the two-vector model, the central problem is how the event mapping can be learned in a way that is amenable to implementations in robots. Three processes are central for event cognition: causal thinking, control of action and learning by generalization. Although it is not yet clear which is the best way to model how the mappings can be learned, they should be constrained by three corresponding mathematical properties: monotonicity (related to qualitative causal thinking); continuity (plays a key role in activities of action control); and convexity (facilitates generalization and the categorization of events). I argue that Bayesian models are not suitable for these purposes, but some more geometrically oriented approach to event mappings should be used. (shrink)

Providing information to consumers in the form of food labels about modern systems of animal farming is believed to be crucial for increasing their awareness of animal suffering and for promoting technological change towards more welfare-friendly forms of husbandry (CIWF, 2007). In this paper we want to explore whether and how food labels carrying information about the lives of animals are used by consumers while shopping for meat and other animal foods. In order to achieve this, we (...) draw upon a series of focus group discussions that were held in Italy as part of a large EU funded project (Welfare Quality®). In the focus group discussions we addressed how, when or if, claims made about the lives of animals on food labels intervened in what the participants bought and ate. We contend that such labels bring the lives of animals to the forefront and act as new ‘subjectifiers’ (Latour, Citation2005: 212) that offer a new tool for becoming an ‘ethically competent consumer’, who cares about the lives of animals while shopping for food. However, this offer is not always easily accommodated within existing competences and previous commitments, as it requires a reassessment of existing, and often intimate, practices of shopping, cooking and eating. We argue that new labels carrying welfare claims, with their intention of increasing market transparency, produce two contrasting outcomes: they open new spaces of action, which offer an opportunity for investing in new competences and for engaging with animal welfare issues, in short, they allow an ‘ethically competent consumer’ to emerge, but they also produce another outcome, or a collateral casualty (Bauman, Citation2007), namely the ethically non-competent consumer. ‘In daily matters, be competent’ (From How to live ethically, the Tao Te Ching). (shrink)

The paper presents and discusses phenomenological facts about perceptual spaces and percepts, but ends with a few thoughts about possible causal explanations of such spaces. The overarching double-sided hypothesis claims that - from a phenomenological point of view - each individual animal has at each consciously perceived moment of time a sense-modality-neutral perceptual space, and that these perceptual spaces are so-called container spaces. This means, to be concrete, that blind persons, deaf persons, and all perceptually (...) non-handicapped persons have the same kind of phenomenological perceptual space, a sense-modality-neutral container space. The causal reflections bring in James J. Gibson’s work on such matters. (shrink)

In his new book Animals and African Ethics, Kai Horsthemke examines whether an African morality can be extended to include animal rights. He argues that the African ethical systems of ubuntu and ukama, because they are anthropocentric at heart, do not adequately make space for animal rights. In his defense of animal rights, Horsthemke responds to arguments claiming that there is a difference between racism and speciesism, and that the latter is morally justifiable even though the former (...) is not. I examine this discussion and agree with Horsthemke that the arguments in favor of speciesism are weak. I defend the claim that—like racism—speciesism is morally unjustifiable. (shrink)

This article pursues overlapping points about ontology, philosophical method, and our kinship with and difference from nonhuman animals. The ontological point is that being is determinately different in different places not because of differences, or even a space, already given in advance, but in virtue of a negative in being that is regional and rooted in place, which Mer-leau-Ponty calls the “hollow.” The methodological point is that we tend to miss this ontological point because we are inclined to what I (...) call transportable thinking, which conceives of things and spatial determinacy itself as being what they are independent of where they are. I argue that we are inclined this way because, in contrast to other animals, we have a weak sense of where we are. We are lost animals. To compensate for lostness, we abstract ourselves from place and conceptualize ourselves and things by way of a transportable, Cartesian “view from above.”. (shrink)