What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?

Author: Vinciane Despret
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452950547
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Book Description
“You are about to enter a new genre, that of scientific fables, by which I don’t mean science fiction, or false stories about science, but, on the contrary, true ways of understanding how difficult it is to figure out what animals are up to.” —Bruno Latour, form the Foreword Is it all right to urinate in front of animals? What does it mean when a monkey throws its feces at you? Do apes really know how to ape? Do animals form same-sex relations? Are they the new celebrities of the twenty-first century? This book poses twenty-six such questions that stretch our preconceived ideas about what animals do, what they think about, and what they want. In a delightful abecedarium of twenty-six chapters, Vinciane Despret argues that behaviors we identify as separating humans from animals do not actually properly belong to humans. She does so by exploring incredible and often funny adventures about animals and their involvements with researchers, farmers, zookeepers, handlers, and other human beings. Do animals have a sense of humor? In reading these stories it is evident that they do seem to take perverse pleasure in creating scenarios that unsettle even the greatest of experts, who in turn devise newer and riskier hypotheses that invariably lead them to conclude that animals are not nearly as dumb as previously thought. These deftly translated accounts oblige us, along the way, to engage in both ethology and philosophy. Combining serious scholarship with humor that will resonate with anyone, this book—with a foreword by noted French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist of science Bruno Latour—is a must not only for specialists but also for general readers, including dog owners, who will never look at their canine companions the same way again.

Animal Rights and Wrongs

Author: Roger Scruton
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780826494047
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
In this acclaimed book, Scruton takes the issues relating to vivisection, hunting, animal testing and BSE and places them in a wider framework of thought and feeling. Now available in paperback

Women Who Make a Fuss

Author: Isabelle Stengers
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1937561402
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 122

Book Description
Virginia Woolf, to whom university admittance had been forbidden, watched the universities open their doors. Though she was happy that her sisters could study in university libraries, she cautioned women against joining the procession of educated men and being co-opted into protecting a “civilization” with values alien to women. Now, as Woolf’s disloyal (unfaithful) daughters, who have professional positions in Belgian universities, Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret, along with a collective of women scholars in Belgium and France, question their academic careers and reexamine the place of women and their role in thinking, both inside and outside the university. They urge women to heed Woolf’s cry—Think We Must—and to always make a fuss about injustice, cruelty, and arrogance.

Our Emotional Makeup

Author: Vinciane Despret
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1635421411
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
Broken hearts, edgy nerves, tightened throats—our emotions grab and take hold of us. But if our emotions appear obvious to us, are they necessarily real or universal? This, of course, is what researchers in physiology and psychology assert, but they will ultimately be disappointed. Vinciane Despret sets out in this book to show how some of our emotions, precisely those we thought were a natural part of our make-up, do not exist unless they have been inscribed in our subjectivity through the mediation of culture. Emotions do not exist per se, but only within relations to others. Anthropologists and ethnologists often return from distant regions and remote islands with emotions unknown to their peers at home, and which can only be expressed in the tribal tongue they have learned. Following such discoveries, one should not be surprised to find that anger does not exist among the Uktus, and the Ikfalus have to teach fear to their children. One only has to consider the emotions of other cultures and traditions to recognize that they are human productions with wide and significant variations, like good manners. Our emotions, finally, represent the way that we see the world and try to make it our own.

The Other End of the Leash

Author: Patricia McConnell, Ph.D.
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0307489183
Category : Pets
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
Learn to communicate with your dog—using their language “Good reading for dog lovers and an immensely useful manual for dog owners.”—The Washington Post An Applied Animal Behaviorist and dog trainer with more than twenty years’ experience, Dr. Patricia McConnell reveals a revolutionary new perspective on our relationship with dogs—sharing insights on how “man’s best friend” might interpret our behavior, as well as essential advice on how to interact with our four-legged friends in ways that bring out the best in them. After all, humans and dogs are two entirely different species, each shaped by its individual evolutionary heritage. Quite simply, humans are primates and dogs are canids (as are wolves, coyotes, and foxes). Since we each speak a different native tongue, a lot gets lost in the translation. This marvelous guide demonstrates how even the slightest changes in our voices and in the ways we stand can help dogs understand what we want. Inside you will discover: • How you can get your dog to come when called by acting less like a primate and more like a dog • Why the advice to “get dominance” over your dog can cause problems • Why “rough and tumble primate play” can lead to trouble—and how to play with your dog in ways that are fun and keep him out of mischief • How dogs and humans share personality types—and why most dogs want to live with benevolent leaders rather than “alpha wanna-bes!” Fascinating, insightful, and compelling, The Other End of the Leash is a book that strives to help you connect with your dog in a completely new way—so as to enrich that most rewarding of relationships.

The Animal Question : Why Nonhuman Animals Deserve Human Rights

Author: Paola Cavalieri
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199721313
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
How much do animals matter--morally? Can we keep considering them as second class beings, to be used merely for our benefit? Or, should we offer them some form of moral egalitarianism? Inserting itself into the passionate debate over animal rights, this fascinating, provocative work by renowned scholar Paola Cavalieri advances a radical proposal: that we extend basic human rights to the nonhuman animals we currently treat as "things." Cavalieri first goes back in time, tracing the roots of the debate from the 1970s, then explores not only the ethical but also the scientific viewpoints, examining the debate's precedents in mainstream Western philosophy. She considers the main proposals of reform that recently have been advanced within the framework of today's prevailing ethical perspectives. Are these proposals satisfying? Cavalieri says no, claiming that it is necessary to go beyond the traditional opposition between utilitarianism and Kantianism and focus on the question of fundamental moral protection. In the case of human beings, such protection is granted within the widely shared moral doctrine of universal human rights' theory. Cavalieri argues that if we examine closely this theory, we will discover that its very logic extends to nonhuman animals as beings who are owed basic moral and legal rights and that, as a result, human rights are not human after all.

Feline Philosophy

Author: John Gray
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374718792
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 99

Book Description
The author of Straw Dogs, famous for his provocative critiques of scientific hubris and the delusions of progress and humanism, turns his attention to cats—and what they reveal about humans' torturous relationship to the world and to themselves. The history of philosophy has been a predictably tragic or comical succession of palliatives for human disquiet. Thinkers from Spinoza to Berdyaev have pursued the perennial questions of how to be happy, how to be good, how to be loved, and how to live in a world of change and loss. But perhaps we can learn more from cats--the animal that has most captured our imagination--than from the great thinkers of the world. In Feline Philosophy, the philosopher John Gray discovers in cats a way of living that is unburdened by anxiety and self-consciousness, showing how they embody answers to the big questions of love and attachment, mortality, morality, and the Self: Montaigne's house cat, whose un-examined life may have been the one worth living; Meo, the Vietnam War survivor with an unshakable capacity for "fearless joy"; and Colette's Saha, the feline heroine of her subversive short story "The Cat", a parable about the pitfalls of human jealousy. Exploring the nature of cats, and what we can learn from it, Gray offers a profound, thought-provoking meditation on the follies of human exceptionalism and our fundamentally vulnerable and lonely condition. He charts a path toward a life without illusions and delusions, revealing how we can endure both crisis and transformation, and adapt to a changed scene, as cats have always done.

Beyond Words

Author: Carl Safina
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0805098887
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Book Description
Hailed conservationist Carl Safina examines animal personhood as told through the inspired narrative portraits of elephants, wolves, and dolphins

Fellow Creatures

Author: Christine Marion Korsgaard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198753853
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Book Description
Presents a compelling new view of our moral relationships to the other animals

The Case for Animal Rights

Author: Tom Regan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520054608
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Book Description
THE argument for animal rights, a classic since its appearance in 1983, from the moral philosophical point of view. With a new preface.