Beyond the Anthropological Difference

✍ Scribed by Matthew Calarco

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 60
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The aim of this Element is to provide a novel framework for gaining a critical grasp on the present situation concerning animals. It offers reflections on resisting the established order as well as suggestions on what forms alternative, pro-animal ways of life might take. The central argument of the book is that the search for an anthropological difference - that is, for a marker of human uniqueness determined by way of a sharp human/animal distinction - should be set aside. In place of this traditional way of differentiating human beings from animals, the author sketches an alternative way of thinking and living in relation to animals based on indistinction, a concept that points toward the unexpected and profound ways in which human beings share in animal life, death, and potentiality. The implications of this approach are then examined in view of practical and theoretical discussions in the environmental humanities and related fields.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Beyond the Anthropological Difference
Contents
1 Introduction
1.1 The Present Situation Concern Animals
1.2 A Guide for Readers
2 The Anthropological Difference
2.1 The Challenge of Doing Philosophical Anthropology Today
2.2 Anthropological Difference “Light” and the Social Turn
2.3 Different “Epistemic Needs”
3 From Speciesism to Anthropocentrism
3.1 The Problem with Speciesism
3.2 The Shift to Anthropocentrism
4 Anthropocentrism and Intersectionality
4.1 A Coda on Intersectionality and Animals
5 Indistinction
5.1 The Difference(s) Approach
5.2 Human-Animal Indistinction
5.3 Shared Conditions
6 From Ethics to Ethology
6.1 The Three Ethologies
7 Beyond Animals?
8 Ontologies and Forms of Life
References
Acknowledgments
Permissions