Human language is a salient example of a neurocognitive system that is specialized to process complex dependencies between sensory events distributed in time, yet how this system evolved and specialized remains unclear. Artificial Grammar Learning (AGL) studies have generated a wealth of insights into how human adults and infants process different types of sequencing dependencies of varying complexity. The AGL paradigm has also been adopted to examine the sequence processing abilities of nonhuman animals. We critically evaluate this growing literature in (...) species ranging from mammals (primates and rats) to birds (pigeons, songbirds, and parrots) considering also cross‐species comparisons. The findings are contrasted with seminal studies in human infants that motivated the work in nonhuman animals. This synopsis identifies advances in knowledge and where uncertainty remains regarding the various strategies that nonhuman animals can adopt for processing sequencing dependencies. The paucity of evidence in the few species studied to date and the need for follow‐up experiments indicate that we do not yet understand the limits of animal sequence processing capacities and thereby the evolutionary pattern. This vibrant, yet still budding, field of research carries substantial promise for advancing knowledge on animal abilities, cognitive substrates, and language evolution. (shrink)

Movies can serve valuable didactic purposes teaching clinical ethics to medical students. However, using film sequences as means to develop critical thinking is not a straightforward task. There is a significant gap in the literature regarding how to analyse the ethical content embedded in these clips systematically, in a way that facilitates the students’ transition from anecdotal reflections to abstract thinking. This article offers a pedagogical proposal to approach the ethical analysis of film sequences in a systematic fashion. This structured (...) stepwise method encourages students to identify the main ethical problem of a selected scene and to reflect on the theoretical principles involved, emphasizing the application of these norms and values in a contextually situated analysis. We believe this method in film studies both reinforces the students’ comprehension of the theoretical framework of an ethical topic, and casts light on its pertinence and limitations under the circumstances of the scene, thus proving a constructive tool to strengthen the bridge between the theoretical teaching of clinical ethics and clinical practice. (shrink)

The main theme of the article, which by genre falls into the area of semiotically influenced philosophy, is a reflection on the relationship between the human and the non-human, using two partial but parallel discourses. The first discourse is the perspective of general semiotics, which is defined in the article on the basis of two distinct forms of rationality that, in different guises, still intervene in debates about the nature of the humanities and social sciences today. The first form of (...) this rationality is semiological, which can be classified under the encyclopaedic rubric of structuralism, and which has its main source of inspiration in general linguistics and its continuation in philosophical anti-humanism. The second perspective has its origins in Peirce’s logicist theory of the sign and his pragmatist metaphysics, and opens up thinking about the sign, the human, and the non-human to a non-language-centric view of the world. Despite their demonstrable theoretical and methodological incompatibility, the present text treats them as incompatible but largely complementary perspectives. It is in their mutual exposition that one can see the moments in which the view of modern human as a semiological and semiotic animal takes shape. The text brings this fundamental and founding theoretical schism into focus by examining two images from post/modern art: Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” and Jorge Luis Borges’ “Averroës’s Search.”. (shrink)

Classical temples in ancient Greece show two deterministic illusionistic principles of architecture, which govern their functional design: geometric proportionalism and a set of illusion-strengthening rules in the proportionalism's stochastic margin. Animal morphology, in its mechanistic-deductive revival, applies just one architectural principle, which is not always satisfactory. Whether a Greek Classical situation occurs in the architecture of living structure is to be investigated by extreme testing with deductive methods.Three deductive methods for explanation of living structure in animal (...) morphology are proposed: the parts, the compromise, and the transformation deduction. The methods are based upon the systems concept for an organism, the flow chart for a functionalistic picture, and the network chart for a structuralistic picture, whereas the optimal design serves as the architectural principle for living structure. These methods show clearly the high explanatory power of deductive methods in morphology, but they also make one open end most explicit: neutral issues do exist. (shrink)

The role of RNA as a messenger in the expression of the genome has been long appreciated, but its functions in regulating chromatin and chromosome structure are no less interesting. Recent results have shown that small RNAs guide chromatin‐modifying complexes to chromosomal regions in a sequence‐specific manner to elicit transcriptional repression. However, sequence‐specific targeting by means of base pairing seems to be only one mechanism by which RNA is employed for epigenetic regulation. The focus of this review is on (...) large RNAs that act in the dosage‐compensation pathways of flies and mammals. These RNAs associate with chromatin over the length of whole chromosomes and are crucial for spreading epigenetic changes in chromatin structure. They do not appear to act in a sequence‐specific manner but might provide scaffolds for co‐operative binding of chromatin‐associated complexes that enable spreading of chromatin modifications. BioEssays 25:434–442, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The as-structure provided by language, even in the sciences, is always constitutive of experience and never merely designative. “From Saying…it comes to pass that the World is made to appear” (Heidegger 1971 [1957]: 101).

The origination of novel structures has long been an intriguing topic for biologists. Over the past few decades it has served as a central theme in evolutionary developmental biology. Yet, definitions of evolutionary innovation and novelty are frequently debated and there remains disagreement about what kinds of causal factors best explain the origin of qualitatively new variation in the history of life. Here we examine aspects of these debates, survey three empirical case studies, and reflect on directions for future inquiry (...) that will advance research into the developmental evolution of novel structures. (shrink)

The regulation of glucose dehydrogenase (GLD) in Drosophila illustrates the combinatorial aspects of gene regulation in development. Furthermore, the findings serve to point up a general question about cukaryotic structural gene control: is regulation of expression always optimal?

This account of civil liability for animals in a range of ancient, mediaeval and modern legal systems (based on a series of studies conducted early in my career: (s.1)) uses semiotic analysis to supplement the insights of conventional legal history, thus balancing diachronic and synchronic approaches. It reinforces the conventional historical sensitivity to anachronism in two respects: (1) (logical) inference of underlying values from concrete rules (rather than attending to literary features of the text) manifests cognitive anachronism, an issue manifest (...) in biblical scholarship’s discussion of the stoning of the homicidal ox in Exod. 21:28 (s.2); (2) the application of modern notions of literal (rather than narrative) meaning not only manifests a semiotic anachronism but here also obscures the institutional origins of many of the rules in a system heavily reliant on self-help and informal settlement. (shrink)

This article develops a Hegelian account of self-consciousness by grounding it in being animal. It draws on contemporary naturalist and rationalist philosophy to support a transformative picture of the relationship between self-consciousness and animal purposes, setting work by Danielle Macbeth, Terry Pinkard, Michael Thompson, and Matthew Boyle into dialogue with two passages from Hegel’s Aesthetics. Because we are conscious of them as such, the article argues, our ends are never simply given to us and must be determined, which (...) means working them out collectively. But this makes dependency a structural feature of human life, as attaining the right relation to our ends means finding ourselves through the eyes of others instantiating our lifeform. Grounding these Hegelian insights in a naturalistic understanding of organic norms, we see that we should not oppose the self-transparency afforded by rationality to the opacity of animal drives. The article concludes that the mark of rationality is not the capacity to transcend or control animal instinct but that we can be problems to ourselves. Spiritual life is just natural life: natural life finding itself problematic. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the problem of the relation between the genetic information contained in the DNA and the emergence of visible structure in multicellular animals. The answer is sought in a reappraisal of the data of experimental embryology, considering molecular, cellular and organismal aspects. The presence of specific molecules only confers a tissue identity on the cells when their concentration exceeds the threshold of differentiation. When this condition is not fulfilled the activity of the genes that code (...) for the specific molecules in question only confers on them a histogenetic potency, i.e. the capacity to form the corresponding tissue in further development (or to transdifferentiate to that tissue). The progressive restriction of histogenetic potencies during development reflects the irreversible repression of more and more genes. The establishment of a given tissue identity under the influence of an inducing tissue (or a morphogenetic hormone) is only possible when the cells have acquired the competence to respond. Tissue differentiation proceeds progressively during development thanks to the cytoplasmic memory that cells retain collectively (or sometimes individually) of the items of information successively registered by their ancestors cells. The increasing complexity of visible structure emerging during development results only from the progression of tissue differentiation. This involves continual exchange of information among the cells and leads to (1) cell displacements and rearrangements, particularly during organogenesis and (2) extreme diversification of cell individualities within tissues, particularly during postembryonic growth. A mutation (just as a teratogenic factor) evokes an anomaly that is localized in both space and time because it alters a certain aspect of cell behaviour (particularly cell surface adhesiveness or mitotic activity) at the time when this is involved in the establishment of a particular structural trait. Neither the organization of the adult nor the modalities of development are encoded in the DNA. The automatic concatenation of cell interactions in the embryo and the structural amplification it entails is conditioned by the specific biochemical composition of the cytoplasm of the egg and by the heterogeneous distribution of its inclusions. (shrink)

This article surveys philosophical and scientific issues arising from questions about animal consciousness. These questions include: which animals have consciousness and what (if anything) that consciousness might be like. Just what sort(s) of science can bear on these questions is a live issue, but investigations of the behavior and neurophysiology of a wide taxonomic range of animals, as well as the phylogenetic relationships among taxa are relevant. Such questions are also deeply philosophical, with epistemological, metaphysical, and phenomenological dimensions. Progress (...) will ultimately require interdisciplinary work by philosophers willing to engage with the empirical details of animal biology, as well as scientists who are sensitive to the philosophical complexities of the issue. The article discusses motivations for studying animal consciousness, and the common framing of such issues by analogy to the human case. Various concepts of consciousness, their historical background, and the related epistemological and metaphysical issues are described. Theories about the structure and function of consciousness are identified and assessed in the context of ideas about the evolution and distribution of consciousness, and comparative approaches to specific cognitive capacities that have often been taken to indicate that humans are not the only conscious animals. (shrink)

For too long the questions of how we treat animals and how we treat our fellow human beings have been considered separately. But the contours of the current animal crisis make it clear – the harms we are inflicting on the nonhuman world have devastating impacts on humans: zoonotic diseases caused by habitat destruction and animal exploitation have brought human life to a standstill; mass production of animals for food is poisoning the ground and contributing to catastrophic climate (...) change. Animal Crisis responds to this fractured relationship between human beings and animals by exploring the complex social and political contexts in which animals are harmed, revealing the connections between our callous and cruel attitudes to the animal world and those same attitudes towards vulnerable human groups. Marking a stark contrast to traditional theories in animal ethics, Alice Crary and Lori Gruen argue that there can be no animal liberation without human emancipation. Borrowing from critical social theory and ecofeminism, they build a framework for understanding and combatting the structural forces that shape and enable the diminishment of some for the advantage of a few, isolating critical resources that are crucial for animal and human emancipatory struggles alike. (shrink)

Animals, Equality and Democracy examines the structure of animal protection legislation and finds that it is deeply inequitable, with a tendency to favor those animals the community is most likely to see and engage with. Siobhan O'Sullivan argues that these inequities violate fundamental principle of justice and transparency.

The expression ‘Oh’ in natural conversation is a signal topic in the development of the Epistemic Program. This article attempts to bring into view a sense of place for this simple expression in the early literature, beginning with ‘Oh’ as a ‘change-of-state token’ and through its subsequent treatments in the production of assessments. It reviews them with an interest in two allied developments. One is the rendering of ‘Oh’ as an expression that ‘indexes’ epistemic structure. The other, pursued in (...) the detail of transcript in Part 2, is how, as of this rendering, the literature manages its tasks of ‘animating transcript’, or how we portray ordinary talk as social action. We think these two moves are closely connected within the EP. And we think they yield a very different ‘vocabulary of motives’, different from the natural language studies of conversation analysis. Our discussions address in turn the central phrases of our title. (shrink)

Most people seem to believe that it is wrong to cause needless suffering and death to non-human animals, and yet most people also contribute to the needless suffering and death of a great many animals. If speciesism is understood as a psychological prejudice—the tendency of an individual human agent to disregard the interests of animals—then this fact is extremely difficult to explain. I argue that once speciesism is understood structurally—as a matter of injustice rather than a matter of interpersonal wrongdoing (...) or individual prejudice—the project of explaining how so many humans are implicated in animal suffering becomes much more tractable. Drawing on the work of feminist theorists such as Sally Haslanger and Catharine MacKinnon, I suggest a way of reconceiving the question of the moral status of animals as a political question about the construction of animals and animality through our social, cultural, legal, and linguistic practices. (shrink)

Do non-human animals have rights? The answer to this question depends on whether animals have morally relevant mental properties. Mindreading is the human activity of ascribing mental states to other organisms. Current knowledge about the evolution and cognitive structure of mindreading indicates that human ascriptions of mental states to non-human animals are very inaccurate. The accuracy of human mindreading can be improved with the help of scientific studies of animal minds. But the scientific studies by themselves do not (...) by themselves solve the problem of how to map psychological similarities (and differences) between humans and animals onto a distinction between morally relevant and morally irrelevant mental properties. The current limitations of human mindreading – whether scientifically aided or not – have practical consequences for the rational justification of claims about which rights (if any) non-human animals should be accorded. (shrink)

Heidegger's assessment of animals in his 1929/30 Freiburg lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, has been the focal point of much recent debate. In this course, it appears Heidegger preserves the prejudices of metaphysical humanism by establishing an opposition between animal "behavior" (Benehmen) and human "comportment" (Verhalten) to the extent that humans, unlike animals, embody an understanding of being and, therefore, encounter beings as such. In this essay, I suggest this distinction can be properly understood only by turning (...) to Heidegger's earliest Freiburg lectures where the question of "factical life" (das faktische Leben) is explicitly addressed. In these lectures, I argue Heidegger develops a three-tiered distinction that allows us to differentiate human life from animal life: (1) Humans, unlike animals, can articulate how things in the world matter to them in terms of where they fit in a meaningful nexus of social relations. (2) By becoming absorbed in these everyday social relations, human life has a unique tendency to secure itself from the abyssal structure of its own temporal "movement" (Bewegung). (3) Human life has the capacity to announce its abyssal structure, an announcement that affects us as anxiety, and makes it possible for us to own up to our temporal and historical constitution. Finally, I suggest that, for Heidegger, any interpretation of animality--whether anthropocentric or not--is itself made possible by a horizonal "event" that is more-than-human, that is always prior to and makes possible any understanding of being whatsoever. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that scientists working on the animal morality debate have been operating with a narrow view of morality that prematurely limits the variety of moral practices that animals may be capable of. We show how this bias can be partially corrected by paying more attention to the touch behaviours of animals. We argue that a careful examination of the ways in which animals engage in and navigate touch interactions can shed new light on current debates (...) on animal morality, like the study of consolation behaviour, while also revealing further forms that animal morality may take and that have been neglected so far, like capacities of tolerance or trust. This defence is structured as an analysis of the three main functions of touch: the discriminative function, the affiliative function, and the vigilance function. (shrink)

This chapter proposes that encountering the Other through the face can be conditioned by social and built technologies. In “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” Emmanuel Levinas relates his experience as a prisoner of war, held in a forced-labor camp in Nazi Germany. He contrasts being denied his humanity by other humans, “called free” (DF, 152), while being recognized as human—indeed as a friend—by a dog the prisoners named Bobby. The episode suggests that though the concept of the (...) face applies to humans, the face is not enough for facing, at least not in the setting of the camp. By contrast, the prisoners seem able to face and be faced by Bobby, even if Levinas remains inconclusive about whether the face applies to animals elsewhere. It follows that the face is operating less like a property, and more like a capacity, a mode as Levinas calls it. But what conditions encountering an Other in this mode? If the face is neither sufficient for facing, nor prior to it, then what conditions facing (or effacing)? I propose that social structures, techniques, architectures, professional roles, and so on matter in coming to face (or efface) the Other. I conclude this from analyzing human-animal encounters in a scientific space of exception: the animal lab. Building on empirical accounts of animal research, I propose that animal research is populated by what I call “technologies of effacement.” These include: (1) built architectures; (2) entering and exit procedures; (3) protective garments and equipment; (4) identification and labeling techniques; and (5) experimental protocols. These technologies serve other manifest ends, but they operate to condition encounters between humans and animals in the lab: they help block the face of humans and animals. (shrink)

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, new anatomical investigations of the brain and the nervous system, together with a renewed interest in comparative anatomy, allowed doctors and philosophers to ground their theories on sense perception, the emergence of human intelligence, and the soul/body relationship in modern science. They investigated the anatomical structures and the physiological processes underlying the rise, differentiation, and articulation of human cognitive activities, and looked for the “anatomical roots” of the specificity of human intelligence when compared (...) to other forms of animal sensibility. This edited volume focuses on medical and philosophical debates on human intelligence and animal perception in the early modern age, providing fresh insights into the influence of medical discourse on the rise of modern philosophical anthropology. Contributions from distinguished historians of philosophy and medicine focus on sixteenth-century zoological, psychological, and embryological discourses on man; the impact of mechanism and comparative anatomy on philosophical conceptions of body and soul; and the key status of sensibility in the medical and philosophical enlightenment. (shrink)

Considering that much of human society is structured through its interaction with non-human animals, and since human society relies heavily on the exploitation of animals to serve human needs, human-animal studies has become a rapidly expanding field of research, featuring a number of distinct positions, perspectives, and theories that require nuanced explanation and contextualization. The first book to provide a full overview of human-animal studies, this volume focuses on the conceptual construction of animals in American culture and the (...) way in which it reinforces and perpetuates hierarchical human relationships rooted in racism, sexism, and class privilege. Margo DeMello considers interactions between humans and animals within the family, the law, the religious and political system, and other major social institutions, and she unpacks the different identities humans fashion for themselves and for others through animals. Essays also cover speciesism and evolutionary continuities; the role and preservation of animals in the wild; the debate over zoos and the use of animals in sports; domestication; agricultural practices such as factory farming; vivisection; animal cruelty; animal activism; the representation of animals in literature and film; and animal ethics. Sidebars highlight contemporary controversies and issues, with recommendations for additional reading, educational films, and related websites. DeMello concludes with an analysis of major philosophical positions on human social policy and the future of human-animal relations. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 48, Issue 1, pp 57 - 76 The aim of this article is to address the question of the anthropological difference by focusing on the intersubjective relation between the human and the animal in the context of a phenomenological analysis of violence. Following some Levinasian and Derridian insights, my goal is to analyze the structural differences between interspecific and intraspecific violence by asking how the generic phenomenon of violence is modalized across various levels: from human to (...) human, from human to animal, from animal to human, from animal to animal. I will address questions of incarnated vulnerability and altered states of affectivity, and I will relate the various forms of violence emerging in the context of the anthropological difference to the question of territoriality, arguing that violence is structurally modified in relation to particular articulations of our worldly spatiality. (shrink)

Food, Animals, and the Environment: An Ethical Approach examines some of the main impacts that agriculture has on humans, nonhumans, and the environment, as well as some of the main questions that these impacts raise for the ethics of food production, consumption, and activism. Agriculture is having a lasting effect on this planet. Some forms of agriculture are especially harmful. For example, industrial animal agriculture kills 100+ billion animals per year; consumes vast amounts of land, water, and energy; and (...) produces vast amounts of waste, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. Other forms, such as local, organic, and plant-based food, have many benefits, but they also have many costs, especially at scale. These impacts raise difficult ethical questions. What do we owe animals, plants, species, and ecosystems? What do we owe people in other nations and future generations? What are the ethics of risk, uncertainty, and collective harm? What is the meaning and value of natural food in a world reshaped by human activity? What are the ethics of supporting harmful industries when less harmful alternatives are available? What are the ethics of resisting harmful industries through activism, advocacy, and philanthropy? The discussion ranges over cutting-edge topics such as effective altruism, abolition and regulation, revolution and reform, individual and structural change, single-issue and multi-issue activism, and legal and illegal activism. This unique and accessible text is ideal for teachers, students, and anyone else interested in serious examination of one of the most complex and important moral problems of our time. (shrink)

Domestic livestock animals and soils must be considered together as part of an agroecosystem which includes plants. Soil sustainability may be simply defined as the maintenance of soil productivity for future generations. There are both positive and negative aspects concerning the role of animals in soil sustainability. In a positive sense, agroecosystems which include ruminant animals often also include hay forage-or pasture-based crops in the humid regions. Such crops stabilize the soil by decreasing erosion, improving soil structure and usually (...) require fewer chemical inputs. Monogastric animal culture is based on an agroecosystem consisting of mainly grain crops. These crops can result in the soil being exposed to water and wind erosion although soil conservation practices that significantly reduce soil losses may be followed. The management of animal manures is not always compatible with soil conservation practices. Careful management of the nutrients in manure is absolutely necessary to avoid nitrate contamination of ground water or phosphorus loading of streams and lakes. In a negative sense, increases in animal livestock populations in association with human population growth are promoting desertification in the arid and semi-arid regions of the world. The key component for a fully compatible and acceptable association between domestic animals and soil productivity is proper management. Careful management of the components of an animal-based agroecosystem is required if soil productivity and environmental quality are to be maintained. Although we have much to learn, technologies are available to move a considerable way towards this ideal state. (shrink)

Domestic livestock animals and soils must be considered together as part of an agroecosystem which includes plants. Soil sustainability may be simply defined as the maintenance of soil productivity for future generations. There are both positive and negative aspects concerning the role of animals in soil sustainability. In a positive sense, agroecosystems which include ruminant animals often also include hay forage-or pasture-based crops in the humid regions. Such crops stabilize the soil by decreasing erosion, improving soil structure and usually (...) require fewer chemical inputs. Monogastric animal culture is based on an agroecosystem consisting of mainly grain crops. These crops can result in the soil being exposed to water and wind erosion although soil conservation practices that significantly reduce soil losses may be followed. The management of animal manures is not always compatible with soil conservation practices. Careful management of the nutrients in manure is absolutely necessary to avoid nitrate contamination of ground water or phosphorus loading of streams and lakes. In a negative sense, increases in animal livestock populations in association with human population growth are promoting desertification in the arid and semi-arid regions of the world. The key component for a fully compatible and acceptable association between domestic animals and soil productivity is proper management. Careful management of the components of an animal-based agroecosystem is required if soil productivity and environmental quality are to be maintained. Although we have much to learn, technologies are available to move a considerable way towards this ideal state. (shrink)

Animal research in the United Kingdom is regulated by the Animals Act 1986, which requires a government minister to weigh the expected suffering of animals against the expected benefits of a proposed animal research project—the “cost-benefit assessment”—before licensing the project. Research into the implementation of this legislation has been severely constrained by statutory confidentiality. This paper overcomes this hindrance by describing a critical case study based on unprecedented primary data: pig-to-primate organ transplantation conducted between 1995 and 2000. It (...) reveals that researchers and regulators significantly underestimated the adverse effects suffered by the animals involved, while overestimating the scientific and medical benefits likely to accrue. Applying dynamic policy network analysis to this case in the context of the evolution of animal research policy indicates that an elitist, policy community type network has persisted since shortly after the network’s formation in 1876. Animal research interests have repeatedly withstood pressure for change from animal protection groups because of their greater resources, structural advantages, and a culture of secrecy that facilitates an implementation gap in animal research regulation. (shrink)

Which and how much of our current drives –individually and as a global community– are driven by ancestral, inherited traits or imprinted on our animal condition? An attempt to approximate this intriguing query is explored here. It pertains to our identity, social constructions, and our ecological interaction. The origin of our species has its roots in ancestral habits, behaviors and a survival drive, transformed from changing environmental conditions. We were not born in a mother-of-pearl cradle nor were protected by (...) magical agents. We grew on the thread of time within the complex nature of bio-ecological interactions. They carved our identity, our genetic expression and the possible origin of our beliefs, resulting in an arch of various behaviors and cultural phenotypes. The biological nature of our construction dragged through millennia through species trials with variable rates of survival times provided traces of inconstant and multiple evolutive chains. Our modern cultural contexts –norms, priorities, values– appear as newly born. Yet, socio-cultural ecology upon which our brain organization and behavioral constructs derive include shared basic behavioral drives with non-human primates. The emergence of humans with a sophisticated language allowed the development of complex virtual constructs based on symbolism and the instruments of culture. This has enhanced cognitive capacity and emotional interaction supported by processes anchored in neural networks distributed within cortical and subcortical levels. Basic, essential neural connectivities were preserved during the evolutionary development of the species. The biological matrix and inheritance are usually segregated from the social and cultural construction. Sophistication of our cultural development tends to set up a divisive fault from primitive foundations of non-human animal behavior (survival, territory, reproduction, prevalence, access to nutrients). These are basic templates and underlie essential individual and group basic drives, and cultural constructs. Humans have not ceased from being territorial (whether applied to virtual or material dimensions). Various forms of social inequities have been expressed in our time and through human history. On evolutive terms, the notion of individual social status within the social structure of a gregarious community generated the probability of an individual ascending or descending that hierarchy. Thus, becoming a potential figure of leadership, or the subordinate or the marginalized. Is there an evolutive antecedent for human social inequities? How do we construct a different future? Post-industrial societies became increasingly dependent on material consumerism and technological cultures, to the point of embraining them; conceptually becoming technological hybrids. Are these a developmental must, or an uncontrolled spin-off of human inventiveness affecting our future? Construction of supernatural agents played a significant role in the socialization/domestication processes. Agents’ intentionality flourished through altered states of conscience, or under fear of natural phenomena attributed to supposed inhabitants of the Natural Kingdom or virtual beings. This imaginary universe, reinforced by ritual behaviors, contributed to control personal/collective distress of various possible origins and conditioned our degrees of emotional and cognitive freedom. (shrink)

Humans, animals, and the environment face a universal crisis: antimicrobial resistance. Addressing AR and its multi-disciplinary causes across many sectors including in human and veterinary medicine remains underdeveloped. One barrier to AR efforts is an inconsistent process to incorporate the plenitude of stakeholders about what AR is and how to stifle its development and spread—especially stakeholders from the animal agriculture sector, one of the largest purchasers of antimicrobial drugs. In 2019, The Wellcome Trust released Reframing Resistance: How to communicate (...) about antimicrobial resistance effectively, which proposed the need to establish a consistent and harmonized messaging effort that describes the AR crisis and its global implications for health and wellbeing across all stakeholders. Yet, Reframing Resistance does not specifically engage the animal agriculture community. This study investigates the gap between two principles recommended by Reframing Resistance and animal agriculture stakeholders. For this analysis, the research group conducted 31 semi-structured interviews with a diverse group of United States animal agriculture stakeholders. Participants reported attitudes, beliefs, and practices about a variety of issues, including how they defined AR and what entities the AR crisis impacts most. Exploration of Reframing Resistance’s Principle 2, “explain the fundamentals succinctly” and Principle 3, “emphasis that this is universal issue; it can affect anyone, including you” reveals disagreement in both the fundamentals of AR and consensus of “who” the AR crisis impacts. Principle 2 may do better to acknowledge that animal agriculture stakeholders espouse a complex array of perspectives that cannot be summed up in a single perspective or principle. As a primary tool to combat AR, behavior change must be accomplished first through outreach to stakeholder groups and understanding their perspectives. (shrink)

Do animals require rich internal representations, such as cognitive maps, to navigate complex environments? Some researchers believe so, as they argue that sensory information is “too poor” to account for animals’ wayfinding abilities. However, this assumption is debatable, as James J. Gibson showed. Gibson proposed that wayfinding involves detecting information about environmental structure over time and used the concepts of “vistas” and “transitions” to explain terrestrial navigation. While these concepts may not apply universally to animal navigation, they highlight (...) the importance of exploiting stable environmental structures for wayfinding. By searching for species-relative environmental structures, we may gain insight into the navigational abilities of different nonhuman animals, while recognizing the unique evolutionary histories and ecological contexts that have shaped these abilities. (shrink)

I argue that the ability to compute phrase structure grammars is indicative of a particular kind of thought. This type of thought that is only available to cognitive systems that have access to the computations that allow the generation and interpretation of the structural descriptions of phrase structure grammars. The study of phrase structure grammars, and formal language theory in general, is thus indispensable to studies of human cognition, for it makes explicit both the unique type of (...) human thought and the underlying mechanisms in virtue of which this thought is made possible. (shrink)

What kind of animals are human beings? And how do our visions of the human shape our theories of social action and institutions? In Moral, Believing Animals>, Christian Smith advances a creative theory of human persons and culture that offers innovative, challenging answers to these and other fundamental questions in sociological, cultural, and religious theory. Smith suggests that human beings have a peculiar set of capacities and proclivities that distinguishes them significantly from other animals on this planet. Despite the vast (...) differences in humanity between cultures and across history, no matter how differently people narrate their lives and histories, there remains an underlying structure of human personhood that helps to order human culture, history, and narration. Drawing on important recent insights in moral philosophy, epistemology, and narrative studies, Smith argues that humans are animals who have an inescapable moral and spiritual dimension. They cannot avoid a fundamental moral orientation in life and this, says Smith, has profound consequences for how sociology must study human beings. (shrink)

We emphasize the feature of Webb's presentation that bears most directly on contemporary research with real animals. Many neuroscience modelers erroneously conclude that a model that performs like an animal must have achieved this goal through processes analogous with those used by the animal. A simulation failure justifies rejecting a model, but success does not justify acceptance. However, an important benefit of models, successful or otherwise, is to stimulate new research.

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)

This essay elaborates the meaning of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of life as “a power to invent the visible” by differentiating it from Heidegger’s claim, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, that the essence of humanity is to be world-forming. By considering how history and language influence conceptions of life, the essay argues that the various forms of animal life are structurally similar to human life, while at the same time are different insofar as different species exhibit distinct ways of living (...) their bodies. Thus, one can maintain a metaphysical continuity between different bodies, while ensuring their difference and specificity. (shrink)

After reviewing the literature on current knowledge about consciousness in humans, we present a state-of-the art discussion on consciousness and related key concepts in animals. Obviously much fewer publications are available on non-human species than on humans, most of them relating to laboratory or wild animal species, and only few to livestock species. Human consciousness is by definition subjective and private. Animal consciousness is usually assessed through behavioural performance. Behaviour involves a wide array of cognitive processes that have (...) to be assessed separately using specific experimental protocols. Accordingly, several processes indicative of the presence of consciousness are discussed: perception and cognition, awareness of the bodily-self, self-related knowledge of the environment (including social environment). When available, specific examples are given in livestock species. Next, we review the existing evidence regarding neuronal correlates of consciousness, and emphasize the difficulty of linking aspects of consciousness to specific neural structures across the phyla because high-level cognitive abilities may have evolved independently along evolution. Several mammalian brain structures (cortex and midbrain) are involved in the manifestations of consciousness, while the equivalent functional structures for birds and fishes would likely be the pallium/tectum and midbrain. Caution is required before excluding consciousness in species not having the same brain structures as the mammalian ones as different neural architectures may mediate comparable processes. Finally, specific neurophysiological mechanisms appear to be strongly linked to the emergence of consciousness, namely neural synchrony and neural feedback. Considering the limited amount of data available and the few animal species studied so far, we conclude that different manifestations of consciousness can be observed in animals but that further refinement is still needed to characterize their level and content in each species. Further research is required to clarify these issues, especially in livestock species. (shrink)

Kant holds that some nonhuman animals “are acquainted with” objects, despite lacking conceptual capacities. What does this tell us about his theory of human cognition? Numerous authors have argued that this is a significant point in favour of Nonconceptualism—the claim that, for Kant, sensible representations of objects do not depend on the understanding. Against this, I argue that Kant’s views about animal minds can readily be accommodated by a certain kind of Conceptualism. It remains viable to think that, for (...) Kant, humans’ sensible representations necessarily represent objects as temporally structured in ways that allow us to have thoughts about them, and such representations are produced, and could only be produced, by the understanding. This allows Conceptualists to maintain that humans’ sensible representations depend on the understanding, while accepting that animals have sensible representations of objects too. We must, therefore, reassess both the warrant for Nonconceptualism and the shape Conceptualist readings must take. (shrink)

Utilitarianism has an apparent pedigree when it comes to animal welfare. It supports the view that animal welfare matters just as much as human welfare. And many utilitarians support and oppose various practices in line with more mainstream concern over animal welfare, such as that we should not kill animals for food or other uses, and that we ought not to torture animals for fun. This relationship has come under tension from many directions. The aim of this (...) article is to add further considerations in support of that tension. I suggest three ways in which utilitarianism comes significantly apart from mainstream concerns with animal welfare. First, utilitarianism opposes animal cruelty only when it offers an inefficient ratio of pleasure to pain; while this may be true of eating animal products, it is not obviously true of other abuses. Second, utilitarianism faces a familiar problem of the inefficacy of individual decisions; I consider a common response to this worry, and offer further concerns. Finally, the common utilitarian argument against animal cruelty ignores various pleasures that humans may get from the superior status that a structure supporting exploitation confers. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy has been castigated by those who regard it as exclusive and elitist because of its failure to take into account a range of structural inequalities existing within contemporary liberal democracies. As a result, it is suggested, deliberative arenas will merely reproduce these inequalities, advantaging the already powerful extolling mainstream worldviews excluding the interests of the less powerful and those expounding alternative worldviews. Moreover, the tactics employed by those excluded social movements seeking to right an injustice are typically those (...) – involving various forms of protest and direct action – which are incompatible with the key characteristics of deliberatively democracy. This paper seeks to examine the case against deliberative democracy through the prism of animal rights. It will be argued that the critique of deliberative democracy, at least in the case of animal rights, is largely misplaced because it underestimates the rationalistic basis of animal rights philosophy, misunderstands the aspirational character of deliberative theory and mistakenly attributes problems that are not restricted to deliberation but result from interest group politics in general. It is further argued that this debate about the apparent incompatibility between the ideals of deliberative democracy and non-deliberative activism disguises the potential that deliberative democracy has for advocates of animal rights and, by extension, other social movements too. (shrink)

Animal ethics committees have been set up in many countries as a way to scrutinize animal experimentation and to assure the public that if animals are used in research then it is for a worthwhile cause and suffering is kept to a minimum. The ideals of Refinement, Reduction and Replacement are commonly upheld. However while refinement and reduction receive much attention in animal ethics committees the replacement of animals is much more difficult to incorporate into the committees’ (...) deliberations. At least in Australia there are certain structural reasons for this but it is likely that most of the reasons why replacement is left out apply to other countries as well. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to bring to light the importance of the notion of économie animale in Montpellier vitalism, as a hybrid concept which brings together the structural and functional dimensions of the living body – dimensions which hitherto had primarily been studied according to a mechanistic model, or were discussed within the framework of Stahlian animism. The celebrated image of the bee-swarm expresses this structural-functional understanding of living bodies quite well: “One sees them press against each other, (...) mutually supporting each other, forming a kind of whole, in which each living part, in its own way, by means of the correspondence and directions of its motions, enables this kind of life to be sustained in the body” (Encyclopédie, article “Observation,” by Ménuret de Chambaud). What is important here is that every component part is always a living part, i.e., every structural unit is always functional. Interestingly, while the twin notions of ‘animal economy’ and organisation are presented as improvements over a mechanistic perspective, they are nonetheless compatible with an expanded sense of mechanism and by extension, with materialism as reflected notably in the writings of Ménuret and Bordeu. We thus propose both a revision and reconstruction of the historical status of the ‘animal economy’, and a reflection on its conceptual status. (shrink)

We're in an era of ever increasing attention to animal rights, and activism around the issue is growing more widespread and prominent. In this volume, Kerstin Jacobsson and Jonas Lindblom use the animal rights movement in Sweden to offer the first analysis of social movements through the lens of Emile Durkheim's sociology of morality. By positing social movements as essentially a moral phenomenon--and morality itself as a social fact--the book complements more structural, cultural, or strategic action-based approaches, even (...) as it also demonstrates the continuing value of classical sociological approaches to understanding contemporary society. (shrink)