Going beyond the creolisation theories of Brathwaite and Glissant, I attempt to develop ideas concerning the gendering of creolisation, and a historicising of affects within it. Addressing affects as ‘physiological things’ contextualised in the history of the Caribbean slave plantation, I seek, importantly, to delineate a trajectory and development of a specific Creole history in relation to affects. Brathwaite's proposition that ‘the most significant (and lasting) inter-cultural creolisation took place’ within the ‘intimate’ space of ‘sexual relations’ is key to my (...) argument. In the light of this, I consider how Creole cultural knowledge about affect—as the primary motivational system inclusive of fear, anger, outrage and so on — might be identified, and what constitutes such Creole knowledge within which affect might be embedded. How might Glissant's relationality and Creole literary texts add to this knowledge? I focus primarily on three texts: Clarke's The Polished Hoe, Collins’ The Colour of Forgetting and Morejón's ‘Amo a mi amo’/‘l Love My Master’. Each text on which I draw is selected for its intersectional representation of gender relations, ‘knowledge about sexual difference’ and its representation of Creole subjectivities within the context problematised here as the ‘demonic ground’. Moreover, as auto-theorising texts, they represent both narrative and meta-narrative of a creolising of affects in and against the economy of the slave plantation. Each represents also a stage or aspect of the development of subjectivities and an affective community that inform this intervention concerned with theorising against consolidated, universalising and Eurocentric conceptualisations of affect. In the process, I attempt to offer a differentiated cartography and literary archaeology of affect. (shrink)

Bénédicte Boisseron investigates the relationship between race and the animal in the history and culture of the Americas and the black Atlantic, exposing a hegemonic system that compulsively links and opposes blackness and animality to measure the value of life.

On a tous entendu parler de la théorie cartésienne de l'animal-machine. On sait moins que cette théorie a largement riposté à la bienveillance envers l'animal préconisée par certains penseurs de la Renaissance, Montaigne en particulier. L'intérêt de Montaigne pour l'animal est philosophique : il conteste l'arrogance de l'homme à s'estimer maître de la nature, et opère un renversement de perspectives. Il invente une pensée de l'animal regardant l'homme. A une vision verticale, Montaigne substitue une relation horizontale (...) entre les hommes et les bêtes, faite de solidarités réciproques. Les animaux ne rappellent-ils pas aux hommes le respect de la nature? La réflexion de Montaigne le conduit encore à réhabiliter le rôle de la sensibilité dans la compréhension du monde. Ne serait-ce que pour cette raison, les Essais méritaient bien un nouveau regard. (shrink)

Can animals be persons? Scientific and philosophical consensus supplies a resounding, 'No!' In this book, Mark Rowlands disagrees. Not only can animals be persons, many of them probably are. A person is an individual in which consciousness, rationality, self-awareness and other-awareness converge, and many animals are such individuals.

Can animals act morally? Philosophical tradition answers 'no,' and has apparently convincing arguments on its side. Cognitive ethology supplies a growing body of empirical evidence that suggests these arguments are wrong. This groundbreaking book assimilates both philosophical and ethological frameworks into a unified whole and argues for a qualified 'yes.'.

Drawing inspiration from Aristotle's biological writings, I attempt to elucidate what it is for something to be alive by providing illuminating logically necessary and sufficient conditions for something'sbeing a living thing in the broadest sense. I then propose a related account of identity conditions for carbon‐based living organisms.

Drawing inspiration from Aristotle's biological writings, I attempt to elucidate what it is for something to be alive by providing illuminating logically necessary and sufficient conditions for something's being a living thing in the broadest sense. I then propose a related account of identity conditions for carbon‐based living organisms.

This paper questions the ontological integrity of Dasein as Heidegger specifies Being in Being and Time. It does so with reference to the real-life, real-time realities of Being-in-the-world and Being-toward-Death, thus with entering into the world in the first place and with ensuing developmental realities anchored essentially in bodily change and movement and with ensuing knowledge of the world and of death. Basic Husserlian insights validate answers to Dasein’s ontological deficiencies, raising questions as to Heidegger’s reading (...) of Husserl texts, for example, of a hereness in relation to a thereness in Dasein’s use of “equipment,” hence of Dasein’s “zero point of orientation” with respect to the world. The question of whether Dasein can be a Being-toward-death without Being-a-Body discloses additional insights into Dasein’s ontological deficiencies by clarifying the nature of physical and lived bodies and by drawing on Husserl’s descriptive analyses of Leib, the lived body. The paper ends by detailing an epistemological irony with respect to Heidegger’s subjective account of Dasein’s knowledge of Being-toward-death. (shrink)

As courts become increasingly technologically sophisticated, it can be expected that the use of the latest visualisation techniques will also increase to make the most of this technology. In particular, the use of computer-generated animations can be expected to become more dominant. There is, however, very little research into the effects of animated evidence on jurors and other members of the judicial process. This paper investigates whether there is a difference in the quality and robustness of memories formed by either (...) hearing an oral testimony or seeing an animated version of it. Also, the paper investigates whether different opinions and attitudes are produced when testimony is presented as an animation as opposed to being verbally presented. Preliminary results reported here indicate that there is indeed a difference in attitude (and therefore potential bias) when animations are used instead of verbal testimony, but that this difference is only apparent in the long term (four weeks or more after the presentation of the animated evidence). The results point to the need for improved knowledge structures for mapping verbal testimony into animations, where issues of implicit knowledge and potential bias are explicitly referenced in the knowledge structure. The paper argues that, until and unless such issues are addressed, it is not safe to use animations in court except to present purely factual information. (shrink)

Can Animals be Moral?, by Mark Rowlands, Oxford University Press, 2012. (An open-access version of this article is available at the link below.) -/- Mark Rowlands is interested in questions similar to those of scientists who investigate the moral capabilities of animals. As a philosopher however, he comes at them from a slightly different angle. Rowlands, who may be best know for his 2008 book The Philosopher and the Wolf, about his unique experience living with a large gray wolf named (...) Brenin, observes that there are two issues involved in determining whether animals can be moral. The first is empirical: what do studies like Frans de Waal’s demonstrate about the mental states of animals? Can Animals Be Moral? begins with a lively overview of experiments suggesting that a wide range of animals—elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, coyotes, dogs and even rats—appear to be motivated by concern for fellow animals. But Rowlands soon leaves empirical studies behind to focus on the central question of his book, which is conceptual. What exactly does it mean to say any creature, human or animal, is acting morally? Although it is about animals, Rowlands’ book offers many fascinating insights into the nature of human morality. Rowlands makes his case with wit and flair, and his willingness to challenge some of the most widely held beliefs about morality calls to mind G. K. Chesterton’s remark that while a dead thing goes with the stream, only a living thing can go against it. The link between morality and responsibility however will be a tough one for many readers to give up. (shrink)

: The treatment of animals and the Holocaust have been compared many times before, but never has a thoroughly detailed comparison been offered. A thirty-nine-point comparison can be constructed, whether or not one believes that animals are oppressed. The question of whether or not the comparison ought to be expressed merely brings into question whether animal liberationists have liberal-democratic rights to express themselves, which they surely do. Four objections are considered: Is the comparison offensive? Does the comparison trivialize what (...) happened to the victims of the Nazis, overlook important differences, or ignore supposed affinities between animal liberationists and Nazis? These four lines of attack are shown to fail. The comparison stands to help us to reflect on the significance of how animals are treated in contemporary times. (shrink)

This article pursues overlapping points about ontology, philosophical method, and our kinship with and difference from nonhuman animals. The ontological point is that being is determinately different in different places not because of differences, or even a space, already given in advance, but in virtue of a negative in being that is regional and rooted in place, which Mer-leau-Ponty calls the “hollow.” The methodological point is that we tend to miss this ontological point because we are inclined to (...) what I call transportable thinking, which conceives of things and spatial determinacy itself as being what they are independent of where they are. I argue that we are inclined this way because, in contrast to other animals, we have a weak sense of where we are. We are lost animals. To compensate for lostness, we abstract ourselves from place and conceptualize ourselves and things by way of a transportable, Cartesian “view from above.”. (shrink)

Tom Regan's four explanations of animal rights are examined and rejected as inadequate. A superior interest based account of animal rights is proposed. This derives an animal's right to freedom from harm from interests that are implicit in the conscious life of the animal. According to Tom Regan, there are four possible accounts for dealing with the issue of how animals should be treated: (1) the ?Kantian account?; (2) the ?cruelty account?; (3) the ?utilitarian account?; and (...) (4) the ?animal rights account? (Regan, 2001, pp. 41?55). In this paper I propose to briefly survey these four accounts and argue for a fifth view, the ?interests account?, which I believe is the most reasonable of the five accounts. (shrink)

Several lines of argument are presented to support the notion that hooved animal rescue is justified, however expensive and controversial. The work of Singer and McNamee is discussed. The article concludes that various breeds have distinct arguments in their favour when it comes to rescue.

An adequate theory of rights ought to forbid the harming of animals to promote trivial interests of humans, as is often done in the animal-user industries. But what should the rights view say about situations in which harming some animals is necessary to prevent intolerable injustices to other animals? I develop an account of respectful treatment on which, under certain conditions, it’s justified to intentionally harm some individuals to prevent serious harm to others. This can be compatible with recognizing (...) the inherent value of the ones who are harmed. My theory has important implications for contemporary moral issues in nonhuman animal ethics, such as the development of cultured meat and animal research. (shrink)

Introduction: The role of animals in philosophies of man -- Part I: What's wrong with animal rights? -- The right to remain silent -- Part II: Animal pedagogy -- You are what you eat : Rousseau's cat -- Say the human responded : Herder's sheep -- Part III: Difference worthy of its name -- Hair of the dog : Derrida's and Rousseau's good taste -- Sexual difference, animal difference : Derrida's sexy silkworm -- Part IV: It's our (...) fault -- The beaver's struggle with species-being : De Beauvoir and the praying mantis -- Answering the call of nature : Lacan walking the dog -- Part V: Estranged kinship -- The abyss between humans and animals : Heidegger puts the bee in being -- Strange kinship : Merleau-Ponty's sensuous stickleback -- Stopping the anthropological machine : Agamben's tick-tocking tick -- Psychoanalysis and the science of kinship -- Psychoanalysis as animal by-product : Freud's zoophilia -- Animal abjects, maternal abjects : Kristeva's strays -- Conclusion: Sustainable ethics. (shrink)

This essay examines several competing accounts of what makes life go well for non-human animals, including prominent subjective and objective theories of animal well-being.

In this article I review Can Animals be Moral? by Mark Rowlands. I outline the central arguments made by Rowlands in defence of his thesis that other animals can be moral subjects and I compare this claim to other who have held that animals can act morally. I finish by raising a couple worries with Rowlands' arguments and note some areas for further inquiry.

According to the author of "After Virtue, " to flourish, humans need to develop virtues of independent thought and acknowledged social dependence. This book presents the moral philosopher's comparison of humans to other animals and his exploration of the impact of these virtues.

Animals, like humans, experience different levels of well-being depending on decisions made by others. As a result, the well-being of animals must be included in any full accounting of the well-being consequences of decisions. However, this is almost never done in large-scale policy and investment analyses, even though it is common to quantify the consequences for human welfare in these decision analyses. This is partly due to prejudice, but increasingly also because we do not currently have good (...) methods for quantifying animal well-being consequences and putting them on the same scale as quantified human well-being consequences. We might call this ‘the problem of interspecies comparisons.’ This important barrier to including animal well-being in decision-making is the result of an insufficiently developed theory and practice of animal well-being and its relation to human well-being. This chapter explains the problem of interspecies comparisons, explains recent research that develops methods to overcome this problem. (shrink)

There is broad agreement that humans can be wronged independently of their incurring any harm, that is, when their welfare is not affected. Examples include unnoticed infringements of privacy, ridiculing unaware individuals, or disregarding individuals’ autonomous decision-making in their best interest. However, it is less clear whether the same is true of animals—that is, whether moral agents can wrong animals in situations that do not involve any harm to the animals concerned. In order to answer this question, I concentrate on (...) the illustrative case of treating animals in a demeaning yet harmless way that would be disrespectful if humans were concerned. I discuss whether such actions are permissible or unjustifiably discriminatory from a moral point of view. I conclude that moral agents cannot directly wrong animals without harming them and thus do not owe it to a particular animal to refrain from such actions. However, if the actions increase the likelihood that animal abuse will occur, this presents a strong indirect reason against performing them. Thus, the reasons for refraining from such actions are merely indirect rather than direct. (shrink)

For most people, animals are the most significant aspects of the nonhuman world. They symbolize nature in our imaginations, in popular media and culture, and in campaigns to preserve wilderness, yet scholars habitually treat animals and the environment as mutually exclusive objects of concern. Conducting the first examination of animals' place in popular and scholarly thinking about nature, Anna L. Peterson builds a nature ethic that conceives of nonhuman animals as active subjects who are simultaneously parts of both nature and (...) human society. Peterson explores the tensions between humans and animals, nature and culture, animals and nature, and domesticity and wildness. She uses our intimate connections with companion animals to examine nature more broadly. Companion animals are liminal creatures straddling the boundary between human society and wilderness, revealing much about the mutually constitutive relationships binding humans and nature together. Through her paradigm-shifting reflections, Peterson disrupts the artificial boundaries between two seemingly distinct categories, underscoring their fluid and continuous character. (shrink)

COMMISSIONER KLAUS VERSEN: Counselors, I want to remind you both of two matters. First, this commission is not bound by the statutes or legal precedents of ...

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?

Definitions of animal welfare often invoke consciousness or sentience. Marian Stamp Dawkins has argued that to define animal welfare this way is a mistake. In Dawkins’s alternative view, an animal with good welfare is one that is healthy and “has what it wants.” The dispute highlights a source of strain on the concept of animal welfare: consciousness-involving definitions are better able to capture the normative significance of welfare, whereas consciousness-free definitions facilitate the validation of welfare indicators. (...) I reflect on how the field should respond to this strain, ultimately recommending against splitting the concept and in favor of consciousness-involving definitions. (shrink)

The animal in Nietzsche's philosophy -- Culture and civilization -- Politics and promise -- Culture and economy -- Giving and forgiving -- Animality, creativity, and historicity -- Animality, language, and truth -- Biopolitics and the question of animal life.

This paper investigates forms of metaphysical vertigo that can appear when contrasts between humans and animals are challenged. Distinguishing three forms of vertigo and four ways of differentiating humans and animals, the paper attempts to achieve a perspicuous representation of what could be termed “the difficulty of being humans when we are animals”; or alternatively, “the difficulty of being animals when we are humans”.

How do the variegated forms of sublunar substances arise in prime matter? Averroes throughout his life believed that “a principle from without” was involved, but changed his mind over its identity. While in an early period of his life he maintained that all forms emanate from the active intellect, he later discarded that metaphysical notion and sought to develop a more naturalistic, astrologically inspired account, which identified the heavenly bodies as the source of sublunar forms. Comparing different versions of Averroean (...) texts, this paper seeks to spell out how, in Averroes' view, the heavenly bodies generate forms in matter. Averroes claims that this is brought about by means of their “heats,” an answer that is however problematic seeing that in the Aristotelian cosmology the celestial realm is quality-less. The paper examines Averroes' ideas on the relationship between light and heat, concluding that the Commentator was unable to integrate the postulate that the heavenly bodies inform matter within his Aristotelian theory of matter. (shrink)

싱어는 공리주의에 입각하여 이익평등고려원칙을 만들고, 그 원칙에 근거하여 종차별주의를 공격한다. 그리고 육식을 종차별적 행위의 전형적 사례라고 비판한다. 그런데 공리주의는 쾌락 총량 극대화의 관점에서, 쾌고를 담고 있는 그릇에 불과한 자의식이 없는 동물들을 대체가능한 존재로 보게 된다. 이리하여 동물들은 자의식이 없는 대체 가능한 동물과 자의식적인 대체 불가능한 동물로 나누어진다. 그리고 그는 대체가능한 동물들을 인간이 자비롭게 도축해 먹으면서 다른 대체 동물들을 행복하게 사육하면 이론적으로 육식이 가능하게 된다는 결론에 빠져들게 된다. 우리가 앞에서 살펴보았듯이 그는 이런 식으로 자신의 생각을 전개해 나가는 과정에서, 그가 그토록 비난해마지 (...) 않았던 종차별주의적 사고방식을 보여준다. 자의식 여부를 기준으로 어떤 동물들은 죽이는 것이 허용되지만 어떤 동물들은 허용되지 않는다는 것이야 말로 전형적인 종차별주의적 사유이기 때문이다. 이는 무엇을 말해주는가? 윤리적 완전채식주의를 공리주의적으로 정당화하려는 싱어의 시도는 실패했다는 것이다. (shrink)

An adequate theory of rights ought to forbid the harming of animals (human or nonhuman) to promote trivial interests of humans, as is often done in the animal-user industries. But what should the rights view say about situations in which harming some animals is necessary to prevent intolerable injustices to other animals? I develop an account of respectful treatment on which, under certain conditions, it’s justified to intentionally harm some individuals to prevent serious harm to others. This can be (...) compatible with recognizing the inherent value of the ones who are harmed. My theory has important implications for contemporary moral issues in nonhuman animal ethics, such as the development of cultured meat and animal research. (shrink)

Spinoza’s attitude toward nonhuman animals is uncharacteristically cruel. This essay elaborates upon this ostensible idiosyncrasy in reference to Hasana Sharp’s commendable desire to revitalize a basis for animal ethics from within the bounds of his system. Despite our favoring an ethics beginning from animal affect, this essay argues that an animal ethic adequate to the demands of our historical moment cannot be developed from within the confines of strict adherence to Spinoza’s system—and this is not yet to (...) speak of a more robust animal ethics which would advocate actual care and compassion for the animals themselves. We argue that on the assumption of Spinoza’s ontological biocentrism, in the presence of Spinozist determinism and the absence of an axiological biocentrism, an anthropocentric axiology necessarily follows. Any Spinozist animal ethic must fall back, therefore, upon appeals to the maximization of human pleasure and power; hence Spinoza’s ruthless injunction to “use (the animals) at our pleasure.” These are the very ontological and ethical assumptions which have incited human self-exaltation in the modern period, in pursuit of power and pleasure even despite the destructive long-term consequences for all the living. We suggest that an adequate animal ethic would require either an abandonment of Spinoza’s ontological biocentrism or the adoption of an axiological biocentrism. (shrink)

According to conventionalist accounts of personal identity, persons are constituted in part by practices and attitudes of certain sorts of care. In this paper, we concentrate on the most well-developed and defended version of conventionalism currently on offer (namely, that proposed by David Braddon-Mitchell, Caroline West, and Kristie Miller) and discuss how the conventionalist appears forced either (1) to accept arbitrariness concerning from which perspective to judge one's survival or (2) to maintain egalitarianism at the cost of making “transfiguring” decisions (...) such as Pascal's Wager rationally intractable. We consider three ways the egalitarian conventionalist could make these choices tractable and show that each one comes at significant cost to the view. We end the paper by considering whether accepting arbitrariness would be a better move for the conventionalist and conclude that, even here, she runs the risk of transfiguring choices being rationally intractable. (shrink)

In this vivid and engaging book Mark Rowlands asks whether animals are capable of being moral. His answer is a mitigated 'yes', supported by an ambitious and convincing philosophical argument. A great deal of attention has been given to the question of whether animals deserve our moral consideration. Much less has been given to the question of whether animals themselves are moral beings. The dominant view among both philosophers and scientists has been that they are not. The standard position (...) is that animals lack the mental faculties necessary for moral action. Rowlands tries to show that '...the blanket dismissal of the possibility of moral action in animals cannot be sustained...'. He systematically attacks the assumptions behind this entrenched attitude and attempts to show us what kind of moral traits an animal mind could support. (shrink)

Technology and animals often serve as the boundaries by which we define the human. In this issue contributors explore these categories as necessary supplements or as porous membranes which disturb the scaffolding of how the human is constructed. A lingering question throughout is whether we have ever been human or if such a category is a non-localizable ideal or perhaps a misnomer. In this collection of essays, internationally known theorists muddle the categorical boundaries such that animals and technologies become necessary (...) components rather than limits for what it means to be human. They examine a range of subjects, including apophatic animality, critical media objects-to-think-with, biosemiotic insect resonances, the monstrous and horrific which dislodges our cultural animals, and the problem of thinking of animality as stupidity. Novels, films, digital objects, scientific laboratories, philosophical texts, animals on the road and in the fields serve as sites for inquiry. The result of these investigations is the spectral possibility that we are not the humans we make ourselves out to be. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki. (shrink)

Modern science has qualified human beings as homo sapiens. Is there a serious scientific theory backing this nomenclature? And can we proclaim ourselves as wise? The classical rational animals characterization has apparently the same syntactic form but it is not working exactly in the same way. Moreover the semantics behind is more appropriate, encompassing a pivotal ambiguity. In the second part of the paper, we further delve into this ambiguity, relating rationality with three fundamental features of these creatures: ability to (...) laugh, sexuality and transformation. (shrink)