The Animal Inside: Essays at the Intersection of Philosophical Anthropology and Animal Studies - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783488212 ISBN 13: 9781783488216

Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Much has been written about animals in applied ethics, environmental ethics, and animal rights. This book takes a new turn, offering an examination of the 'animal question' from a more fundamental, philosophical-anthropological perspective. The contributors in this important volume focus on how the animal has appeared and can be used in philosophical argumentation as a metaphor or reference point that helps us understand what is distinctively human and what is not. A recurring theme in the essays is the existence of a zone of ambiguity between animals and humans, which puts into question comfortable assumptions about the uniqueness and superiority of human nature.

While the chapters straddle the boundaries of historical-philosophical and systematic, continental and analytic approaches, their thematic unity knits them together, presenting a rich, broad, and yet cohesive perspective. The first part of the book offers general explorations of the relation between animal and human nature, and of the concomitant existential and ethical dimensions of this relationship. The chapters in the second part address the same theme, but, in so doing, focus on specific aspects of animal and human nature: imagination, politics, history, sense, finitude, and science.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Geoffrey Dierckxsens is a post-doctoral researcher in the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Rudmer Bijlsma is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa.

Michael Begun is a graduate student in philosophy at Fordham University. Thomas Kiefer is a graduate student in philosophy at Fordham University.

Thomas Kiefer is a graduate student in philosophy at Fordham University.

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The Animal Inside

Essays at the Intersection of Philosophical Anthropology and Animal Studies

By Geoffrey Dierckxsens, Rudmer Bijlsma, Michael Begun, Thomas Kiefer

Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd

Copyright © 2017 Geoffrey Dierckxsens, Rudmer Bijlsma, Michael Begun and Thomas Kiefer
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-821-6

Contents

Introduction: Exploring the Fluid Boundaries between Animals and Humans Geoffrey Dierckxsens, Rudmer Bijlsma, Michael Begun, and Thomas Kiefer, 
Part I: General Explorations of Human and Animal Nature, 
1 Promethean Tricks and Thyestean Feasts: Bloody Sacrifice and Vegetarianism in Ancient Cultures Giulia Sissa, 
2 Kata Phusin: Ancient and Contemporary Perspectives on the Hermeneutic of Animality Thomas Kiefer, 
3 The Animal in Early Modern Philosophical Anthropology Rudmer Bijlsma, 
4 "An Insect Fallen on Its Back": Animal Imagery in the Work of Jean-Paul Sartre Jo Bogaerts, 
5 What Is Distinctively Human? Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre on the Relation between Humans and Animals Michiel Meijer and Rob Compaijen, 
6 Better a Human Than a Lion (!?) Age-old Human Superiority Fights Reason Lantz Fleming Miller, 
Part II: Aspects of Human and Animal Nature, 
7 The Imagination of Animals: Rilke, Kafka, and the Philosophy and Literature of Embodied Cognition Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, 
8 Werewolves: A Reconsideration of Hobbes's State of Nature from the Perspective of Biopolitics Herbert De Vriese, 
9 "The Genuine Problem of the Human Being": Nietzsche, Animality, and History Michael Begun, 
10 The Hermeneutical Animal: Making Sense of Animal Otherness "in the Flesh" Geoffrey Dierckxsens, 
11 Being-toward-Meat: An Analytic of Human-Animal Finitude Matthew Calarco, 
12 On Laboratory Life for a Wired Object: Mirror Neurons and the New Red Peter Babette Babich, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 
About the Authors, 

CHAPTER 1

Promethean Tricks and Thyestean Feasts

Bloody Sacrifice and Vegetarianism in Ancient Cultures

Giulia Sissa

In the cultures of the Greco-Roman world, human and nonhuman beings live in symbiosis. Cohabitation also means exploitation and violence. Domestic animals are partners in the household and on the battlefield. They are victims of ritualized immolation. They are treated as food. Wild animals are hunted. The same cultures, however, generate a meditation on the taxonomic contiguity of all living beings, in particular on the kinship of nonhuman and human animals. Theories of metempsychosis and fictions of metamorphosis make us believe in a unified nature, where humans share life and sentiency with many other creatures. This is also an uncertain universe. One can never know how a transformed human self may look like. Meat-eating might result inadvertently in cannibalism.

Sacrifice and vegetarianism are two extreme aspects of this culturally significant, and philosophically disquieting, togetherness. Habits of nutrition are always based on general premises about divinity, humanity and non-humanity, similarity and difference, purity and pollution, body and soul, pleasure and sociability. This is why food is a privileged object of anthropology. To understand food is to understand, on the one hand, the guiding ideas incorporated in rituals and social practices and, on the other, the critical questioning of killing and ingesting living beings that are comparable, analogous, and yet unequal vis-à-vis us. This chapter will discuss the anthropological meaning of animal sacrifice, in the narrative thinking of archaic Greek poetry, namely the epics of Hesiod and Homer, and the radical challenge to the rationale of sacrifice, to be found in Pythagoras's philosophy of daily life. Vegetarianism offers an explicit normative response to the euphoric and reassuring validation of a bloody diet.

RED MEAT AND WHITE BONES

In Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural analysis, myths tell of transformations. Their intricate plots narrate alterations, metamorphoses, and the origin of things. They do so through a colorful casting of typical characters. Across cultures, mythologies recount preposterous vicissitudes that involve divinities, craftsmen, tricksters, women, witches, plants, stars, and, above all, animals. Because of their disparate anatomies and distinctive behaviors, animals are especially "good to think with." But this is just the surface. Adventurous twists and turns, Lévi-Strauss argues, convey an interplay of logical oppositions. These polarities take shape in peculiar, embodied, and very concrete figures, and manifest themselves sequentially – in narrative form. To make sense of a narrative, therefore, we have to grasp the diametrically opposed ideas that underpin the storyline. One recurrent dichotomy pits chaos against taxonomy; states of excessive "conjunction," in which things are mixed up and confused, against states of extreme "disjunction," in which confusion yields to discordance. This basic contrast generates multiple stories in which one state changes into the other, more precisely in which the earliest condition of the universe undergoes a process of differentiation, through separations, generations, foundations, and inventions. These stories usually end with the discovery of what Lévi-Strauss calls "bonne distance," a "good distance," which lies between abusive propinquity and excessive remoteness.

Jean-Pierre Vernant applied structural analysis to the Prometheus episode in Hesiod's Theogony. Prometheus cuts up an ox and offers its ostea leuka, its "white bones," wrapped in fat, to Zeus. This provocative trick inaugurates a separation between Mortals and Immortals, which will be complete with the fabrication of Woman. After Prometheus's prank, the poem adds, the tribes of men now burn ostea leuka to the gods. If this etiological explanation is true, then any sacrifice consists in carving up the body of an animal and separating the edible, meaty parts from the unpalatable bones, in order to burn the latter to the gods and to roast and distribute the former among the humans in attendance at the ceremony. The rite allegedly reenacts the fatal divorce of the human world from the divine. The Olympians inhale the smoke of burning bones; the Mortals chew/swallow/digest red meat – hence the differential butchering of a sacrificial victim, the distribution and specific handling of its parts. Hesiod's narrative of Prometheus's mischief in the Theogony, accompanied by its final etiological gloss, provides the textual foundation for a clear-cut dichotomy.

To start, let us read the Theogony, 535–558.

There is a krisis:

For when the gods and mortal men had a dispute at Mecone, even then Prometheus was forward to cut up a great ox and set portions before them, trying to deceive the mind of Zeus. Before the rest he set flesh and inner parts thick with fat upon the hide, hiding them with an ox paunch; but for Zeus he set the white bones dressed up with cunning art and hidden under shining fat.

Zeus responds:

Then the father of men and of gods said to him: "Son of Iapetus, most glorious of all lords, good sir, how unfairly you have divided the portions!"

Prometheus, in turn, replies:

But wily Prometheus answered him, smiling softly and not forgetting his cunning trick: "Zeus, most glorious and greatest of the eternal gods, take which ever of these portions your heart within you bids." So he said, thinking...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783488212
• ISBN 13: 9781783488216
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Herausgeber: Dierckxsens Geoffrey, Bijlsma Rudmer, Begun Michael, Kiefer Thomas
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland