This paper studies the role of faces in animal life to gain insight into Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, especially his later ontology. The relation between animal faces and moving, animal bodies involves a peculiar, expressive logic. This logic echoes the physiognomic structure of perception that Merleau-Ponty detects in his earlier philosophy, and exemplifies and clarifies a logic elemental to his later ontology, especially to his concept of an invisible that is of the visible. The question why the (...) logic of the face can manifest this analogy or homology with the logic of perception and ontology is treated through a study of embryology, which suggests that the logic of the face ramifies a deeper logic of being. Methodologically, the face is taken as something like a lens into the onto-logic of being. This lens suggests that what underlies Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology is a logic of animality. (shrink)

In Scepticism and Animal Faith, Santayana pursues two projects: the development of a philosophy of animal faith and the presentation of an ontology. The two projects are not easily reconciled and Santayana appears not to have distinguished them or recognized that they pull in different directions. The hypothesis that he has two projects explains a variety of the anomalous features of Santayana's philosophy, including the account of matter concerning which Kerr-Lawson and I have long disagreed.

In this article the treatment of animals by the early Christian and Arabic philosophy has been developed, focusing mainly on the work of Isidore of Seville and Al-Farabi. The contribution of this study is to highlight the insufficiently considered aspects of the ontology of animals and of their endorsement as moral "subjects" in both Latin and Arabic literature up to our days.

_Explores questions concerning animals from a continental perspective._.

Through a critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the concepts of nature, life, and behavior, and with contemporary accounts of animal groups, this article argues that animal groups exhibit sociality and that sociality is a fundamental ontological condition. I situate my account in relation to the superorganism and selfish individual accounts of animal groups in recent biology and zoology. I argue that both accounts are inadequate. I propose an alternative account of animal groups and animal (...) sociality through a Merleau-Pontian inspired definition of behavior. I criticize Merleau-Ponty’s individualistic prejudice, but show that his philosophy contains the resources necessary to overcome this bias. I define behavior as a holistic, ongoing, meaningful and Umwelt-oriented intrinsically configured expression of living forms of existence. By looking at cases of animal groups drawn from contemporary studies in zoology and behavioral ecology, I show that animal groups, in the fact that they behave, manifest themselves to be a fundamental form of existence, namely, the social form of existence. (shrink)

Explores questions concerning animals from a continental perspective.

An overview and analysis of Salla Tuomivaara's comparison of the respective views of Emile Durkheim and Edward Westermarck on sociology, humans, and other animals.

In this paper, I propose the concept of the “animated persona,” a soundless voice that says, “I am here” and appears on the surface of someone or something. This concept can bring clarity to the experience of perceiving a kind of personhood on a corpse, a wooden mask, or even a tree. In the first half of this paper, I will examine some Japanese literature and a work of Viktor Frankl’s that discuss these phenomena. In the second half, I will (...) analyze the concept of animated persona from five perspectives: (1) a compelling power, (2) surface-ness, (3) religious experience, (4) universality, and (5) the meaning of “I.” Lastly, I will discuss the relationship among the three layers of biological object, animated persona, and self-conscious being. My aim is to shed new light on the meaning of the encounter between the living and the dead. (shrink)

In this paper, I begin with the most basic tenet in Aristotelian metaphysics, namely that ousia or ‘substance’ is ontologically prior to the nine other categories of being, including the pros ti, the condition of being literally ‘toward something’ or what is sometimes called 'relation' or ‘relationality.’ Aristotle repeats this frequently throughout his works and it is, I take it, manifest. However, in the Politics, so I argue here, Aristotle’s dialectical study of common appearances leads him to describe ‘human being’ (...) in a way that runs contrary to this. That is, insofar as the human being is the zoon politikon or ‘political animal,’ it seems to be constituted as the being it is precisely by way of its relatedness to other human beings in the polis. I then try to determine the moment of ‘birth’ for this essentially relational being, and find that it may not be the emergence of the human from the womb, but rather, at least according to this interpretation of the Politics, the moment when we enter into the logos together with others in posing, discussing, debating, and re-posing the abidingly open question of the human Good. (shrink)

Eric Olson criticizes Lynne Baker’s constitution account of persons on the grounds that personhood couldn’t be ontologically significant as nothing new comes into existence with the acquisition of thought. He claims that for something coming to function as a thinker is no more ontologically significant than something coming to function as a locomotor when a motor is added to it. He levels two related charges that there’s no principled answer about when and where constitution takes place rather than an already (...) existing object just acquiring new properties. I’ll argue that none of these objections are problems for understanding person to be a substantial kind. (shrink)

While Heidegger privileges the role of language ( logos ) as the condition for being-in-the-world, the fundamental ontology ignores how logos is informed by our bodily comportment to the world as animals. This capacity for logos ultimately depends upon the capacities we share with members of other animal species. Although Aristotle privileges logos as distinctive to the human being, logos also maintains an aporetic relationship to the other capacities of the soul. If we are to reexamine Heidegger’s debt (...) to Aristotle, we might begin by retrieving Heidegger’s interpretation of logos as an ontological problem for distinguishing Dasein from animal life. (shrink)

Taking a cue from Derrida, this paper offers a reading of Heidegger on the issue of animal time. Recent scholarship on Heidegger and animal life has shown how he describes animals as always lacking something (language, world, hands, death…) in comparison to human Dasein. Yet little attention has been paid to time itself. By reading the few references to animals in Being and Time , as well as contemporaneous works, one discovers that Heidegger never fully addresses the question (...) of the animal in terms of time. Despite his claim to offer a “comparative examination” between the ontologies of humans and animals, Heidegger continually raises the issue of animal time but only to leave it unsettled. Moving from Being and Time to his 1929-30 lecture course, Heidegger effectively brackets out the question of time, which this essay takes to be the reason why he himself remains unconvinced by his own analyses of animal ontology. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the implications arising from the commonplace premise that the nature of being admits in ontological kinds. That is, there are actual, fundamentally different genera of being in the world, namely human and non-human beings. That for entities to be considered suitable for valuation under the same ethical rubric, it must be assumed that the general character of their mental states is commensurate. However, if we accent that it is indeterminable what kind of being an entity (...) is without access to the phenomenological character of its experiences, then it may be argued that the ethical standards for non-human animals which follow from our inductive descriptions will always remain a matter of opinion, expressed from a particular point of view delimited within the metaphysical commitments derived from a human ontology of being. (shrink)

This article proposes a specific kind of ontological investigation in the field of science and religion. I argue that science and religion can create distinct practices that enact multiple realities, and thus they should be seen as more than different views of the same world. By analyzing the details of scientific experiments crucial for the invention of halal stunning, I demonstrate that religion and science are both permeable to the social, the biological, and to each other, and that seemingly incommensurable (...) realities can co‐occur in the body of an animal. Here, animals’ modes of existence are interdependent with the technologies being used, and with the web of interactions that they are drawn into. In the process of inventing halal stunning, it is not so much about the same animal body that is thought about differently as it is about animals spanning across multiple, physiological, realities as they are recruited into different webs of interactions to create a new slaughter method. (shrink)

Paper presented at the Heidegger Circle 2011. Although Aristotle’s influence on young Heidegger’s thought has been studied at length, such studies have almost exclusively focused on his interpretation of Aristotle’s ethics, physics and metaphysics. I will rather address Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle’s ontology of life. Focusing on recently published or recently translated courses of the mid 20’s (mainly SS 1924, WS 1925-26 and SS 1926), I hope to uncover an important aspect of young Heidegger’s thought left unconsidered: namely, that (...) Dasein’s existential structures – Befindlichkeit, Understanding and being-with-one-another through language – arose from his close reading of Aristotle’s ontology of life, of animal life. (shrink)

In the whole universe, from the lowest beings to the highest ones, love permeates through the entire world of existence. Love is one of the hallmarks and perfections of existence in animals. This survey was done to illuminate and explain Mullah Sadra’s ontological viewpoint on the entity of sentiments and the inborn and innate love in the existence of non-human animals. The analytic and descriptive method was used to conduct this study and research. An animal is one of the (...) creatures in the essence of the existence that possesses its own perfect attributes. Animals have souls, the effects of which are life, perception, free choice, and emotions. Animals have an order for their existence, and they are attributed with perfection to the extent of their intensity and weakness. That is to say, all animals are not at the same level. Their perfection is also the same as their existence is. There is life, perception, and love in animals, but it depends on their proportion of existence. All animals are in love, but every animal having the highest share of its rank enjoys more love. Mullah Sadra’s ontological principles in proving the existence and flow of love in animals are that the existence is ‘original,’ ‘non-composite,’ ‘equivocal,’ and ‘coextensive’ with life, conception and love, and ‘God, the Almighty, is the true Beloved of all beings including animals’ souls.’ Evolutionarily, animals can only move to the point where humanity of human beings begins. (shrink)

I discuss controversial claims about the status of non-human animals as moral beings in relation to philosophical claims to the contrary. I address questions about the ontology of animals rather than ethical approaches as to how humans need to treat other animals through notions of, for example, animal rights. I explore the evolutionary origins of behavior that can be considered vices or virtues and suggest that Thomas Aquinas is closer to Darwin's view on nonhuman animals than we might (...) suppose. An appreciation of the complexity of the emotional lives of social animals and their cooperative behaviors in light of the work of animal ethologists such as Frans de Waal and Marc Bekoff suggests that social animals can be considered moral in their own terms. I discuss the charge of anthropomorphism, drawing on the work of archaeologist Steven Mithen, and consider arguments for the evolution of conscience in the work of anthropologist Christopher Boehm. Only the biological basis for the development of conscience and religion has evolved in nonhuman animals, and this should not be confused with sophisticated moral systems of analysis or particular religious beliefs found in the human community. (shrink)

Research that involves the creation of animals with human-derived parts opens the door to potentially valuable scientific and therapeutic advances, yet invokes unsettling moral questions. Critics and champions alike stand to gain from clear identification and careful consideration of the strongest ethical objections to this research. A prevailing objection argues that crossing the human/nonhuman species boundary introduces inexorable moral confusion (IMC) that warrants a restriction to this research on precautionary grounds. Though this objection may capture the intuitions of many who (...) find this research unsettling, it relies on mistaken views of both biology and moral standing, ultimately distorting the morally relevant facts. We critically examine IMC, identify mistaken essentialist assumptions, and reframe ethical concerns. The upshot is a stronger line of objection that encourages a more inclusive and productive ethical discourse. (shrink)

Reportedly ever since Pythagoras, but possibly much earlier, humans have been concerned about the way non human animals (henceforward “animals” for convenience) should be treated. By late antiquity all main traditions with regard to this issue had already been established and consolidated, and were only slightly modified during the centuries that followed. Until the nineteenth century philosophers tended to focus primarily on the ontological status of animals, to wit on whether – and to what degree – animals are actually rational (...) beings; accordingly they allowed – or denied – them some kind of moral standing. This modus operandi was for the first time seriously questioned by Jeremy Bentham, who put the issue on a different track. If the question, as Bentham suggested, is not if animals can think or speak, but if they can suffer1, then it seems plausible that moral agents ought to abstain from inflicting unnecessary suffering on animals; in other words, humans might have at least one – even limited – moral duty towards animals. And if this, in turn, is true, then animals should arguably be allowed the commensurate moral right, namely the right not to be inflicted unnecessary pain. Then, if animals possess this right, they could probably possess others, as well. This is how grosso modo the issue of animal rights became a pivotal part of the discussion concerning animal ethics. Bentham himself, of course, wouldn’t have gone that far; to him even the idea of human rights sounded like “simple… rhetorical nonsense upon stilts”.2 It was mostly due to his views, however, that the debate was moved from the way things actually are to the way things should ideally be – thus merging into what, in my view, should always have been: one primarily concerning ethics. (shrink)

Biopolitics and necropolitics have used animals as a concept to illustrate a particular human biopolitical situation, much in the “tradition” of Aristotle’s provisional biopolitics. In the Western context, not only our understanding of politics but also tropology and the conceptual apparatus itself are haunted by this ancient legacy, which underlies a vertical ontology tied to processes of spatialization and containment, a vertical ontology that enables an intelligibility of figurative translation. The article considers tropological systems as systems embedded in (...) particular forms of governmentality, forms of the violent administration of life and death. To show how certain bodies are marked as animal or animal-like and used in the (metaphorical) processes of exclusion/inclusion, it focuses on Giorgio Agamben’s thoughts on Carolus Linnaeus and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s analysis of metaphorics in the most recent (r)evolutionary theory, symbiogenesis, developed by Lynn Margulis. Moreover, to radically disturb the graduated ontological premises of traditional stylistics and tropology, we move beyond existing conceptualizations of the body and the sovereign, all of which are based on de-borderization, intersections, movements, and transfigurations. (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)

Most theists accept an anthropomorphic view of the divine: a God whose cognition and incarnate embodiment closely resembles human cognition and human embodiment. Most theists also accept an Anselmian view of God on which God has the maximal set of ontological (including moral) perfections. This chapter defends the view that Anselmianism entails that the anthropomorphic view of God is false and that some nonhuman animal is divine. Two arguments are given for this position, which we can call zootheism. The (...) first argument, the Power Argument, claims that because nonhuman animals have moral interests, maximal fairness entails a share in power over those interests. This, in turn, entails a direct share of power within the Godhead, which entails that some nonhuman animal is divine. The second argument, the Incarnation Argument, hues closely to Christian arguments for an incarnation: because God loves us, God will share in our suffering and will pursue non-privileged kinds of incarnate embodiments. This naturally motivates incarnating as a nonhuman animal, particularly given the historically privileged status of humans. Moreover, maximal fairness and maximal love entail that God also pre-existed as a nonhuman animal. Thus, God is, and always was, a nonhuman animal. (shrink)

Realities are structured categorially, and comprehension of our internal and external conditions do not appear to be global or unitary. Rather, both human and non human animals function within their worlds and understand these by categorizing their experiences. Drawing upon many areas of life, the authors consider the ontological, mereological and multi-faceted structure of experience to explore how an understanding of categories can further knowledge.

Hierarchical views of nature have for centuries been used to justify the enslaving of peoples perceived as inferior, the often violent and coercive “reeducation” of indigenous peoples, the patriarchal subjugation of women, the cruel use of nonhuman animals for often trivial purposes, and the wanton destruction of the natural world. I join those who condemned the oppressive nature of these forms of hierarchical thinking. Yet, I fear that, in their effort to right past wrongs, too many thinkers are in danger (...) of throwing the axiological baby out with the ontological bathwater. Though the aim at a great ontological leveling is certainly understandable, I fear that, in embracing the opposite extreme and rejecting all hierarchical thinking, some may be in danger of doing violence to the many real and even morally significant differences between individuals. My claim in this paper is that Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism provides a model for how to appreciate the many grades and types of beings in the world, while avoiding an invidious normative hierarchy that inevitably places everything at the whim of human beings. That is, I will argue that it is possible to defend hierarchy without anthroparchy. To provide context, I will begin with a brief analysis of Aristotle’s “Great Chain of Being” and will then contrast it with Whitehead’s process philosophy. Given this context, using the subtle and perceptive work of the ecofeminist Karen J. Warren, I will then present a model for how to recognize a “descriptive hierarchy” while rejecting a simplistic “prescriptive hierarchy.” . (shrink)

The French philosopher Renaud Barbaras remarked that late in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s career, “The phenomenology of perception fulfills itself as a philosophy of expression.” In _Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Biology, and Ontology, _Véronique M. Fóti_ _addresses the guiding yet neglected theme of expression in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. She traces Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about how individuals express creative or artistic impulses through his three essays on aesthetics, his engagement with animality and the “new biology” in the second of his lecture (...) courses on nature of 1957–58, and in his late ontology, articulated in 1964 in the fragmentary text of _Le visible et l’invisible _. With the exception of a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 essay “Cezanne’s Doubt,” Fóti engages with Merleau-Ponty’s late and final thought, with close attention to both his scientific and philosophical interlocutors, especially the continental rationalists. Expression shows itself, in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, to be primordial, and this innate and fundamental nature of expression has implications for his understanding of artistic creation, science, and philosophy. (shrink)

This article critically examines sociology’s anthropocentricity and its current limitations in research on nonhuman beings, using animal communication and interspecies interaction as examples. The paper demonstrates, drawing on several key theoretical strands, how the focus of traditional sociology on human sociality can be extended to include nonhuman beings. To understand the state of such sociology, the notion of anthropomorphocentrism is introduced as an explanation of the field’s current position, reflecting a desire to go beyond the study of humans, but (...) a reluctance to explore non-human entities without human-like attributes. The author describes existing limitations, proposes methodological steps, and explicates the epistemological and ontological features to be considered when including animals as objects of study in sociology. It is proposed, following the example of convergence analysis as a rigorous empirical method, to replace the transfer of existing human taxonomies with the creation of new taxonomies based on data on each interaction, be it between humans and animals, between animals of the same species or between species. The author thus stresses the need for an empirical approach to research on species and interspecies taxonomies. The article concludes that a move away from anthropocentrism and anthropomorphocentrism towards an expansive study of living creature communication is necessary to generate valid data, formulate conclusions, and construct theories in sociology. However, in making this move, one must be mindful of the limitations of borrowed human concepts and mechanisms in interpreting non-human interactions, which also impinge on the process and outcome of non-human interaction research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Animals in the World: Five Essays on Aristotle’s Biology by Pierre PellegrinChristopher LutzPELLEGRIN, Pierre. Animals in the World: Five Essays on Aristotle’s Biology. Translated by Anthony Preus. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2023. vi + 324 pp. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $35.95This book explores two broad questions that have for decades been driving Pierre Pellegrin’s contributions to the so-called biological turn in Aristotle studies: whether and in (...) what sense Aristotle actually has a biology; the degree to which Aristotle’s teleological commitments lead him to characterize living things and the world that they inhabit as perfect. By analyzing various interplays that the zoological treatises posit between, on the one hand, the form and end of each species and, on the other hand, its material and efficient causes, Pellegrin reveals the astounding depth of Aristotle’s affinity with modern biology.In consideration of the millennia-spanning distance between Aristotle and the emergence of modern biology in the nineteenth century, Pellegrin first of all seeks to establish that he may call Aristotle a biologist without committing anachronism. Chapter 1 identifies two teleological notions that connect Parts of Animals and Generation of Animals to nineteenth-century conceptions of biology: Using organic function as the primary organizational principle in comparative anatomy relates Aristotle to Cuvier, and the concept of adaptation relates Aristotle to Darwin. Citing the profound influence of History of Animals on Cuvier (and thus on nineteenth-century biology), Pellegrin argues that its chief biological [End Page 357] innovation lies in the suggestion that observation is epistemically useful even when we are unable to explain that which we have observed.Chapter 2 emphasizes the role that mechanistic (that is, material and efficient) causality plays within the teleological explanations in Aristotle’s studies of animals. After a lengthy discussion of hypothetical necessity, Pellegrin uses PA 1.1’s distinction between formal nature and material nature to suggest that Aristotle recognizes an “ontological autonomy” of material nature, by which he seems to mean that matter has certain properties independent of any form. Linking Aristotle to Darwin, he argues that for Aristotle the perfection of each species consists in its fitness for (everlasting) survival. The end-directed formal nature of the species must negotiate with its autonomous material nature in order to secure for it an advantageous condition that guarantees its permanence but inevitably comes at the expense of certain disadvantages. For example, birds have no ears because they need extra matter for feathers (see PA 2.12).Shifting the focus to a crucial difference between Aristotle and modern biology, chapter 3 investigates the unity of Aristotelian natural science and biology’s place within it. Pellegrin finds analogies between Aristotle’s explanations of sexual reproduction, spontaneous generation, and Meteorology ’s account of the formation of inanimate homoiomerous matter (for example, metals, minerals). Sexual reproduction (clearly involving a material, formal, efficient, and final cause) is more causally complex than spontaneous generation (which according to Pellegrin has no preexisting final cause and only a quasi-formal cause), yet we understand spontaneous generation only by analogy with sexual reproduction, which is for Aristotle explanatorily prior. Spontaneous generation, in turn, is marginally more complex than the formation of homoiomerous matter (which also has only a quasi-formal cause and, further, no final cause at all), yet we understand the latter only by analogy with spontaneous generation and sexual reproduction. Pellegrin concludes that all natural science is united insofar as “material-efficient causality concerns all natural realities,” living and nonliving alike; however, because Aristotle in each case explains the less complex by analogy with the more complex, the teleological study of fully developed living things is explanatorily primary within his natural science. In this way, Aristotle stands in stark contrast to modern natural science, in which biology is explanatorily posterior to chemistry and physics.Chapter 4 qualifies the explanatory priority of complex organisms by challenging any notion of an Aristotelian scala naturae. Pellegrin works to show that the recognition of irreducible diversity is present in Aristotle’s very definition of an animal, arguing that in animals the nutritive faculty is neither ontologically nor developmentally prior to the sensitive and motive... (shrink)

There is a thinking animal in your chair and you are the only thinking thing in your chair; therefore, you are an animal. So goes the main argument for animalism, the Thinking Animal Argument. But notice that there are many other things that might do our thinking: heads, brains, upper halves, left-hand complements, right-hand complements, and any other object that has our brain as a part. The abundance of candidates for the things that do our thinking is (...) known as the Thinking Parts Problem. Animalists who endorse the Thinking Animal Argument must solve this problem by giving reasons for privileging the animal over its rivals. In order to meet this challenge, some animalists have argued that the best solution is a biological minimalist one. In what follows, I argue that every extant biological minimalist solution to the Thinking Parts Problem fails. (shrink)

This essay begins by noting that “the question of the animal” has been abandoned prematurely in the current theoretical landscape in favor of the Plant, the Stone, the Object, and a more general rush toward Materialism and Realism (in their various permutations). The latest iteration of this economy of knowledge production (and planned obsolescence) may be found in the ubiquitous discourse of “the Anthropocene.” While it is a large and diverse body of thought and writing, I will focus here (...) on Bruno Latour’s influential rendition in Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. I share Latour’s reservations about the concept of the Anthropocene, and I also share his desire for a more complex understanding of Gaia as an “outlaw” whose alterity pushes back against traditional concepts of nature as a totalized and homeostatic order. As I will show, however, Latour’s Actor Network Theory is far too blunt a theoretical instrument to account for the radical difference between qualitatively different orders of complexity and causation that obtain in biological vs. physical systems, which is crucial, of course, for understanding the role of the biological in the larger domain of Gaia and climate change. As I will show – drawing principally on the work of Stuart Kauffman and his proposition that the evolution of the biosphere is neither non-ergodic nor governed by entailing laws – the real “outlaw” (to use Latour’s language), when it comes to the evolution of the earth and its climate system, is the contingency and recursivity of autopoietic biological systems, which enable a form of downward and distributed causality, and a “decoupling” between micro- and macro-levels (to borrow Alicia Juarrero’s phrase), in which the alterity and negativity of temporality (hence my emphasis on “dynamic”) is irreducible and “creative.” We see this both ontogenetically and phylogenetically (as in the example of niche formation in ecosystems). In short, biology is not (only) physics – far from it. Why is this important? Because, after decades of hegemony by the neo-Darwinian reductionist paradigm, with its infatuation with the genome as the “book of life” and its subsequent engineering paradigm for biological existence, it is crucial to formulate an anti-reductionist, interdisciplinary framework for understanding the real complexity of life on the planet and its evolution. Here, however – as I argued in What is Posthumanism? – the issue isn’t just what you are thinking (the decentering of the human and humanism that Latour and I both share) but how you are thinking it. Here, Latour’s work has a desire, but no theory, for the alterity we both seek. At this crucial epistemic moment, we need, in short, an anti-reductionist anti-reductionism – not flat ontologies, but ever more “jagged” ones. (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)

According to the mysteriousness objection, moral rights are wholly mysterious, metaphysically suspect entities. Given their unexplained character and dubious metaphysical status, the objection goes, we should be ontologically parsimonious and deny that such entities exist. I defend Tom Regan's rights view from the mysteriousness objection. In particular, I argue that what makes moral rights seem metaphysically mysterious is the mistaken tendency to reify such rights. Once we understand what moral rights are and what they are not, we will see that (...) rights talk is neither mysterious nor nonsensical. I then consider a second aspect of Regan’s rights view that some critics have found “mystifying.” I circumvent this objection by identifying and defending an alternative rights-conferring property. I conclude by pointing out the moral significance of these findings vis-à-vis our current treatment of nonhuman animals. (shrink)

The single day conference “Ontology, Mind and Free Will. A Workshop in Memory of E.J. Lowe (1950-2014)” took place at the Department of Humanities of the University of Macerata on March, 3 rd 2014. It included as speakers Sophie Gibb (Durham University), Mario De Caro (Roma Tre University) and Michele Paolini Paoletti (University of Macerata). This event was thought by the organizers in order to honor the British philosopher Ethan Jonathan Lowe, who suddenly passed away last January with infinite (...) regret of the scientific community. The discussion of some of his major research topics, such as mental causation, free will and essence, was therefore meant as the right homage to one of the most influential philosophers who animated and deepened the debate of the last thirty years. Regarding the singular reviews of this report, Matteo Grasso took care of Sophie Gibb’s and Mario De Caro’s talks, while Mattia Sorgon reviewed Michele Paolini Paoletti’s. (shrink)

This article examines a handful of recent creative works that reflect speculatively on transgender pasts. I argue that each of these creative texts uses ontological interventions to reimagine moments in trans activist history that scholars have narrated only in terms of the attenuation of sociality and of political participation. These works do this by ratifying trans activists’ relations of reciprocity with extraordinary entities that are not often supported by secular and anthropocentric historiographies. Instead of engaging accounts of coalition work with (...) extraterrestrials, nonhuman animals, and magical powers mainly as sites of “subjugated knowledges”, these creative works all consider the political capacitations afforded by trans collaborations with other-than-human agencies. In order to make this argument, I draw from the recent body of anthropological scholarship known as the “new animism,” and consider the absence of commentary on religion and secularism within the Anglo-American posthuman turn. Ultimately, beyond offering alternatives to historical declension narratives about trans activism, these works urge scholars to consider how relations with “subaltern” agentive forces have become increasingly important to disenfranchised communities’ efforts to negotiate the political debilitations of a post-neoliberal world. (shrink)

Wild animal reproduction poses an important moral problem for animal rights theorists. Many wild animals give birth to large numbers of uncared-for offspring, and thus child mortality rates are far higher in nature than they are among human beings. In light of this reproductive strategy – traditionally referred to as the ‘r-strategy’ – does concern for the interests of wild animals require us to intervene in nature? In this paper, I argue that animal rights theorists should embrace (...) fallibility-constrained interventionism: the view that intervention in nature is desirable but should be constrained by our ignorance of the inner workings of ecosystems. Though authors sometimes assume that large-scale intervention requires turning nature into an enormous zoo, I suggest an alternative. With sufficient research, a new form of gene editing called CRISPR promises to one day give us the capacity to intervene without perpetually interfering with wild animals’ liberties. (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)

In this article I try to show that the most deep level ontology can have rich meaning for our understanding of such practical and everyday phenomena as education and interaction. With this deep level ontology I mean the problem of universals. Starting from famous traditional stances of realism and nominalism, which both are for the modern theories of growth and Bildung, I continue to the third and more recently developed ontological theory, trope theory according to which the properties (...) (qualities, relations etc.) are real (unlike in nominalism) but not universal (like in realisms). Then I will take a closer look at the trope theory of CB Martin. According to it every causal event is an interaction event between simple or complex beings in which their existing dispositions may produce manifesting properties. This point of view is radically anti dualistic because that basic level causal interaction has in the simplified forms all the elements of semiotic, meaningful of mental activity of such complex beings likes humans and animals. Ome of the main general conclusions of the article is that all causal affections contain a kind of “interpretation” from the side of affected object. (shrink)

The concept of natural, common life is distinguished from life as political existence in the opening lines of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer – a schism within ‘life’ that has profound consequences for Agamben’s political theory and ontology. Agamben claims that bare life now “dwells in the biological body of every living being” . As such, it is necessary to ascertain what the ‘life’ of biopolitics is – the life capable of politicization. The notion of natural living being is central (...) to Agamben’s account, and yet it remains an ambiguous and indeterminate concept. This conceptual ambiguity is informed by Agamben’s account of anthropogenesis and the relation between the ‘human’ and the realm of animality, to which the concept of negativity is pivotal. Negativity is also central to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. However, for Merleau-Ponty the ontology of Nature and man constitute “the leaves of one sole Being” . Animality and human being are emergent; Merleau-Ponty adamantly maintains, “there is no rupture” . This paper analyzes the notion of negativity in Agamben and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of Being and life, and contends that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy gives rise to an ontology that offers a more open and productive account of animality and nature. In Agamben’s account, negativity is constitutive of man, which gives rise to an irreducible disjuncture between Being and life. For Merleau-Ponty, negativity is ‘in’ Being. There is no tension between Being and ‘life’: Nature is “a leaf or layer of total Being,” and we must conceive of “the ontology of Nature as the way toward ontology”. (shrink)

This paper questions the ontological integrity of Dasein as Heidegger specifies Being in Being and Time. It does so with reference to the real-life, real-time realities of Being-in-the-world and Being-toward-Death, thus with entering into the world in the first place and with ensuing developmental realities anchored essentially in bodily change and movement and with ensuing knowledge of the world and of death. Basic Husserlian insights validate answers to Dasein’s ontological deficiencies, raising questions as to Heidegger’s reading of Husserl texts, for (...) example, of a hereness in relation to a thereness in Dasein’s use of “equipment,” hence of Dasein’s “zero point of orientation” with respect to the world. The question of whether Dasein can be a Being-toward-death without Being-a-Body discloses additional insights into Dasein’s ontological deficiencies by clarifying the nature of physical and lived bodies and by drawing on Husserl’s descriptive analyses of Leib, the lived body. The paper ends by detailing an epistemological irony with respect to Heidegger’s subjective account of Dasein’s knowledge of Being-toward-death. (shrink)

The first part of this article presents Ricœur's hermeneutics as a method, a style of writing and a particular philosophy. As a method, Ricœur revisits the notion of traditions and interpretations, in order to keep them open to debts from the past, to unexplored sources, to creative imagination and to the critical search for meaning. It is a style of writing, constantly put in dialogue with the history of philosophy which aims at unpacking a diversity of meanings. It is also (...) a philosophy in itself, a phenomenological hermeneutics of the self who is capable and suffering, although the Cogito is shattered and cannot pretend to immediacy and thus needs mediations. Such an hermeneutics is also tied to a new interpretation of ontology of being as capacity and actualization. The meanings of the other are discussed, as well as the notion of narrative identity for Ricœur's hermeneutics. In the second part of the article, the author highlights how this hermeneutics remains tied to the search for the originary and for universals, and is animated by the constant ethical demand of respect of the singularity of each person. This is why the notion of trust plays a particular role, as well as the dialogue with Levinas. The author thus revisits the important aspects of Ricœur's Little Ethics, and its distanciation from Sartre's voluntarist existential project. It is shown that beyond interpretations, a critique of ideologies remains necessary, as well as the demand for an ethics, a morality, and a judgment in situation. (shrink)

Addressed here are certain relations among intentionality, consciousness, and subjectivity which Searle has lately been calling our attention, while arguing that certain brain-occurrences possess irreducibly subjective features - in the sense that no amount of strictly objective, third-person information about the animal and his or her brain and behavior could result in a description of any such features, except by inference based on the first-person perspective. In his relevant discussions, Searle has focused on the aspectual shapes of conscious mental (...) brain-occurrences, that is, the particular intrinsic feature of any mental occurrence responsible for the mental occurrence's being of or as of something beyond itself. However, Searle's view would seem, undesirably, to conceive of aspectual shape as purely appearential, in the same sense as a hallucinated fire-breathing dragon is purely appearential. Has not Searle thus abandoned ontological subjectivity - though he has available other ways to conceive of the undoubtedly, as he says, plain fact about biological evolution which is ontological subjectivity? Throughout the present article, Freud's conception of consciousness serves as an aid to understanding Searle's views of subjectivity, consciousness, and intentionality. (shrink)

A very clear and powerfully argued defence of a most important and surprisingly neglected view."--Derek Parfit, All Souls College, Oxford. "If Dr. Olson is right, we are living animals and what goes on in our minds is wholly irrelevant to questions about our persistence through time....[Should] transform philosophical thinking about personal identity."--Peter van Inwagen, University of Notre Dame.