Author: Marc Bekoff
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 9780834825871
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
Nonhuman animals have many of the same feelings we do. They get hurt, they suffer, they are happy, and they take care of each other. Marc Bekoff, a renowned biologist specializing in animal minds and emotions, guides readers from high school age up—including older adults who want a basic introduction to the topic—in looking at scientific research, philosophical ideas, and humane values that argue for the ethical and compassionate treatment of animals. Citing the latest scientific studies and tackling controversies with conviction, he zeroes in on the important questions, inviting reader participation with "thought experiments" and ideas for action. Among the questions considered: • Are some species more valuable or more important than others? • Do some animals feel pain and suffering and not others? • Do animals feel emotions? • Should endangered animals be reintroduced to places where they originally lived? • Should animals be kept in captivity? • Are there alternatives to using animals for food, clothing, cosmetic testing, and dissection in the science classroom? • What can we learn by imagining what it feels like to be a dog or a cat or a mouse or an ant? • What can we do to make a difference in animals’ quality of life? Bekoff urges us not only to understand and protect animals—especially those whose help we want for our research and other human needs—but to love and respect them as our fellow beings on this planet that we all want to share in peace.
Author: Josephine Donovan
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628954752
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
It’s no secret that animals are considered objects in the fields of law, commerce, and science, characterized as property and commodities. Animals, Mind, and Matter: The Inside Story challenges this ascription and establishes that animals are living subjects, who have minds and opinions of their own and care about what happens to them. Donovan contends that animals’ voices or standpoints should be part of any human decisions concerning their ethical treatment. Elaborating on feminist care theory and critical animal standpoint theory, the author provides compelling evidence for animal subjectivity, exploring in the process the nature of subjectivity and consciousness while drawing from recent developments in quantum and emergence theories that point away from the dominant ontology of Cartesian objectivism. Through these explorations, Donovan proposes that a new narrative is emerging in the arts and sciences—an inside story that re-subjectifies natural life and leaves behind the deadening Midas touch of Cartesian objectivism.
Author: Mary Midgley
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820320412
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
Animals and Why They Matter examines the barriers that our philosophical traditions have erected between human beings and animals and reveals that the too-often ridiculed subject of animal rights is an issue crucially related to such problems within the human community as racism, sexism, and age discrimination. Mary Midgley's profound and clearly written narrative is a thought-provoking study of the way in which the opposition between reason and emotion has shaped our moral and political ideas and the problems it has raised. Whether considering vegetarianism, women's rights, or the "humanity" of pets, this book goes to the heart of the question of why all animals matter.
Author: Marian Stamp Dawkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
ISBN: 0199587825
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
In a world increasingly concerned with the human species and its future, Marian Stamp Dawkins argues that we need to rethink some of the fundamental questions regarding animal welfare. How are we justified in projecting human emotions on to animals? What kind of mental lives do they have? What can science tell us about their quality of life?
Author: Richard Sorabji
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150171788X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
"They don't have syntax, so we can eat them." According to Richard Sorabji, this conclusion attributed to the Stoic philosophers was based on Aristotle's argument that animals lack reason. In his fascinating, deeply learned book, Sorabji traces the roots of our thinking about animals back to Aristotelian and Stoic beliefs. Charting a recurrent theme in ancient philosophy of mind, he shows that today's controversies about animal rights represent only the most recent chapter in millennia-old debates. Sorabji surveys a vast range of Greek philosophical texts and considers how classical discussions of animals' capacities intersect with central questions, not only in ethics but in the definition of human rationality as well: the nature of concepts; how perceptions differ from beliefs; how memory, intention, and emotion relate to reason; and to what extent speech, skills, and inference can serve as proofs of reason. Focusing on the significance of ritual sacrifice and the eating of meat, he explores religious contexts of the treatment of animals in ancient Greece and in medieval Western Christendom. He also looks closely at the contemporary defenses of animal rights offered by Peter Singer, Tom Regan, and Mary Midgley. Animal Minds and Human Morals sheds new light on traditional arguments surrounding the status of animals while pointing beyond them to current moral dilemmas. It will be crucial reading for scholars and students in the fields of ancient philosophy, ethics, history of philosophy, classics, and medieval studies, and for everyone seriously concerned about our relationship with other species. A Townsend Lecture Book
Author: Robert W. Lurz
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262016052
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Animals live in a world of other minds, human and nonhuman, and their well-being and survival often depends on what is going on in the minds of these other creatures. But do animals know that other creatures have minds? And how would we know if they do? In Mindreading Animals, Robert Lurz offers a fresh approach to the hotly debated question of mental-state attribution in nonhuman animals. Some empirical researchers and philosophers claim that some animals are capable of anticipating other creatures' behaviors by interpreting observable cues as signs of underlying mental states; others claim that animals are merely clever behavior-readers, capable of using such cues to anticipate others' behaviors without interpreting them as evidence of underlying mental states. Lurz argues that neither position is compelling and proposes a way to move the debate, and the field, forward. Lurz offers a bottom-up model of mental-state attribution that is built on cognitive abilities that animals are known to possess rather than on a preconceived view of the mind applicable to mindreading abilities in humans. Lurz goes on to describe an innovative series of new experimental protocols for animal mindreading research that show in detail how various types of animals -- from apes to monkeys to ravens to dogs -- can be tested for perceptual state and belief attribution.
Author: Peter Carruthers
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198843704
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
Claims about consciousness in animals are often made in support of their moral standing. Peter Carruthers argues that there is no fact of the matter about animal consciousness and it is of no scientific or ethical significance. Sympathy for an animal can be grounded in its mental states, but should not rely on assumptions about its consciousness.
Author: Clive D. L. Wynne
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691126364
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Does your dog really know when you've had a bad day? Noted animal expert Wynne takes aim at the work of such renowned animal rights advocates as Peter Singer and Jane Goodall for falsely humanizing animals.
Author: Nik Taylor
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004203605
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
Drawing on current trends in post-modernism and post-humanism this books offers a challenge to current ways of thinking, theorising and talking about animals and humanimal relations
Author: Sarah Cohen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350203602
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
How do our senses help us to understand the world? This question, which preoccupied Enlightenment thinkers, also emerged as a key theme in depictions of animals in eighteenth-century art. This book examines the ways in which painters such as Chardin, as well as sculptors, porcelain modelers, and other decorative designers portrayed animals as sensing subjects who physically confirmed the value of material experience. The sensual style known today as the Rococo encouraged the proliferation of animals as exemplars of empirical inquiry, ranging from the popular subject of the monkey artist to the alchemical wonders of the life-sized porcelain animals created for the Saxon court. Examining writings on sensory knowledge by La Mettrie, Condillac, Diderot and other philosophers side by side with depictions of the animal in art, Cohen argues that artists promoted the animal as a sensory subject while also validating the material basis of their own professional practice.
