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Matthew Calarco explores key issues in the philosophy of animals and their significance for our contemporary world.
The Boundaries of Human Nature shows readers why philosophy can help transform not just the way we think about animals but also how we interact with them.
List of contents
Introduction
1. Plato’s Pigs
2. Aristotle’s Wonderful Animals
3. Cynicism’s Dogs
4. Jainism’s Birds
5. Plutarch’s Grunter
6. Descartes’s Beast-Machine
7. Kant’s Elephants
8. Bentham’s Suffering Animal
9. Nietzsche’s Overhuman Animal
10. Derrida’s Cat
11. Adams’s Absent Referent
12. Plumwood’s Crocodile
13. Haraway’s Companion Species
Notes
Index
About the author
Matthew Calarco is professor of philosophy at California State University, Fullerton. His books include Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (Columbia, 2008) and Beyond the Anthropological Difference (2020).
Summary
Matthew Calarco explores key issues in the philosophy of animals and their significance for our contemporary world. The Boundaries of Human Nature shows readers why philosophy can help transform not just the way we think about animals but also how we interact with them.
Additional text
The Boundaries of Human Nature presents in elegant and succinct prose how animals have been regarded by leading thinkers from the Jains and early Greek thinkers to modern and late modern philosophers. Calarco gleans from this array of diverse authors a profound lesson: namely, that animals require our utmost regard and appreciation rather than being made subject to slaughter and mass extermination.
