Jakob von Uexküll's theories of life -- Biography and historical background -- Nature's conformity with plan -- Umweltforschung -- Biosemiotics -- Concluding remarks -- Marking a path into the environments of animals -- The essential approach to the organism -- Heidegger and the biologists -- Paths to the world -- Disruptive behavior : Heidegger and the captivated animal -- The worldless stone -- The poor animal -- For example, three bees and a lark -- Animal morphology -- A shocking wealth (...) -- A fine line in the rupture of time -- An affected body -- The theme of the animal melody : Merleau-Ponty and the umwelt -- The structure of behavior -- A pure wake, a quiet force -- A leaf of being -- Interanimality -- The-animal-stalks-at-five-oclock : Deleuze's affection for Uexküll -- Problematic organisms -- Uexküll's ethology of affects -- The body without organs, the embryonic egg, and prebiotic soup -- Nature's refrain sung across milieus and territories -- The animal stalks. (shrink)

_Examines the significance of animal environments in contemporary continental thought._.

A cross-section of the writings of Dominique Lestel, Vinciane Despret and Roberto Marchesini is presented here in translation across three special issues on philosophical ethology. These thinkers, relatively unknown in anglophone scholarship, offer important contributions to contemporary debates in posthumanism and animal studies. Particularly in so far as they scrutinise our often awkward attempts to understand the behaviour of animals in labs and fields – to know what animal bodies can do – they share in the rethinking of interspecies forms (...) of life, as domains of both empirical knowledge and zoo-political performance, and thereby take important steps towards a new philosophical ethology. (shrink)

In the study reported here we examined the impact of population size and two proxies of risk of resource failure on the diversity and complexity of the food-getting toolkits of hunter–gatherers and small-scale food producers. We tested three hypotheses: the risk hypothesis, the population-size hypothesis, and a hypothesis derived from niche construction theory. Our analyses indicated that the toolkits of hunter–gatherers are more affected by risk than are the toolkits of food producers. They also showed that the toolkits of food (...) producers are more affected by population size than are the toolkits of hunter–gatherers. This pattern is inconsistent with the predictions of both the risk hypothesis and the population-size hypothesis. In contrast, it is consistent with the predictions of the niche construction hypothesis. Our results indicate that niche construction has affected the evolution of technology in small-scale societies and imply that niche construction must be taken into account when seeking to understand technological variation among food producers and the technological changes that occurred in association with the various transitions to farming that have occurred over the last 10,000 years. (shrink)

Securitization is considered to be one of the biggest financial innovations of the last century. It is also regarded as both a catalyst and a solution to the 2008 financial crisis. Once a popular method of financing the mortgage and consumer credit markets, aspects of the global securitization market are now struggling to revive. In this paper, I discuss the role that ethics played in securitization prior to the 2008 financial crisis and find that it is not an obvious story (...) of moral failures, but rather that it lies in more subtle elements of the financial system. The ethics uncertainty role in the securitization story is one of flawed incentives and the shifting of responsibility for handling risk. The role of securitization and the ethics of risk transfer have rarely been discussed explicitly in the literature. The historical origins of securitization and lessons learned from previous flawed uses of the process are also provided. I also detail the various global institutional reform proposals that have taken place. Moving forward, it is crucial to understand the causes, consequences, and ethical implications of securitization in the financial crisis so as to help individuals and managers better assess risk, align incentives, and design appropriate policy responses. (shrink)

:This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Vinciane Despret's thought: the history and philosophy of ethology; animal culture; stories and storytelling; feminism; philosophical anthropology; animal studies; collaborative research; and animals in laboratories, in the field, on farms, and in books. It touches on thinkers and artists including Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Luc Petton.

Recent work in artificial intelligence, or AI, has produced programs capable of serious intellectual work in science. Results from AI are used to show that there exist mechanized procedures for discovering hypotheses and that these methods often lead to plausible hypotheses. The question to be answered is: By what methods can a computer program find plausible explanations of empirical data? To answer this, the common metaphor of search for describing several AI programs is examined followed by a look at examples (...) of programs actually constructed. Five types of search considered are: random, exhaustive, selective, heuristic, and opportunistic search. From there, the paper generalizes to some conclusions about mechanizing hypothesis formation. (shrink)

This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Roberto Marchesini’s thought: the history and philosophy of ethology and entomology; zooanthropology and animal culture; philosophical ethology and philosophical anthropology; animal studies; and animals in laboratories, in the field, on farms, and in household/urban settings. It touches on thinkers including Margherita Hack, Giorgio Celli, Donna Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Charles Darwin, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

This essay provides a theoretical and methodological introduction to the writings of Vinciane Despret. Over the last twenty years Despret has contributed a significant number of books and articles in the fields of philosophical ethology and animal studies, and throughout them all Despret's methodological approach resists easy explanation. There is no single, uni- versal method applicable to all animals, in every situation; instead, Despret responds with an open curiosity to the plurality of animal worlds and the storied versions about them. (...) She studies and works with animals just as much as with scientists, farmers, and conserva- tionists. Taking joy in the diversity of animal behaviour, she creates conditions that allow animals to be interesting, and finds humour, warmth, and care in the stories that they tell. Through the practices of human–animal relations Despret contends that humans are transformed, in their thought just as much as in their practices, as much as animals are transformed. This ess.. (shrink)

We begin to glimpse what the concept of zoopolitics means in Derrida, namely the place of an analysis and an interpretation of our political modernity in its links with the animality of the human and that of the animal, or more precisely still in its links with the proper of the human [le propre de l’homme] as it thinks of itself as a political and rational animal, in opposition to the animal that would be neither political nor rational. It must, (...) however, be noted right away that despite what might be called the animalistic tropism of Derridean deconstruction, it does not include a thesis maintaining the continuity between human and animal. If it is unquestionable that deconstruction refrains from making animality .. (shrink)

:In 2012, Despret published an abecedary entitled What Would Animals Say, If … They Were Asked the Right Questions? Covering a range of subjects, themes, authors, and animals, Despret carefully and playfully demonstrates the ability of animals to continuously force us to re-examine our most basic and arrived at human conceptions, understandings, and biases. Excerpted from this book are two chapters on art and gender. “O for Œuvres” looks at the question of animal agency and intentionality in the making of (...) a work of art. Drawing from Alfred Gell, Étienne Souriau, and bower-birds, Despret expands the notion of agency in art and questions the tendency towards human exceptionalism. In “Q for Queer,” king penguins come out of the closet to reveal and question certain preconceived human ideas about gender, sexuality, and cultures of heteronormativity within animal worlds. (shrink)

The Stern School is undertaking a program to teach business ethics to Stern professors and others who have an interest in ethics but no previous formal instruction. The two-year series of faculty seminars will produce a cadre of professors who are well equipped to do research, to write scholarly papers, and to teach business ethics at a high level. The documentation of the seminar series will be available for others to use.

Taking a cue from Derrida, this paper offers a reading of Heidegger on the issue of animal time. Recent scholarship on Heidegger and animal life has shown how he describes animals as always lacking something (language, world, hands, death…) in comparison to human Dasein. Yet little attention has been paid to time itself. By reading the few references to animals in Being and Time , as well as contemporaneous works, one discovers that Heidegger never fully addresses the question of the (...) animal in terms of time. Despite his claim to offer a “comparative examination” between the ontologies of humans and animals, Heidegger continually raises the issue of animal time but only to leave it unsettled. Moving from Being and Time to his 1929-30 lecture course, Heidegger effectively brackets out the question of time, which this essay takes to be the reason why he himself remains unconvinced by his own analyses of animal ontology. (shrink)