This article, drawing on selected feminist magazines of the 1980s, particularly Feminist Arts News (FAN) and GEN, offers a textual ‘braiding’ of narratives to re-present a history of Black British feminism. I attempt to chart a history of Black British feminist inheritance while proposing the politics of (other)mothering as a politics of potential, pluralistic and democratic community building, where Black thought and everyday living carry a primary and participant role. The personal—mothering our children—is the political, affording a nurturing of alterity (...) through a politics of care that is fundamentally antiracist and antisexist. I attempt to show how Black feminist thought can significantly contribute to democracy in the present and how Black British history and thought, as fundamentally antiracist and anticolonial, can generate a reinvention much needed in the present of a shared British history. I argue for feminist intervention premised upon a politics of care, addressing through activist mothering the urgency of Black absence from prestigious institutions. Such debilitating absence in Britain inhibits the development of scholarship, distorts feminist history and seriously concerns potential Black feminists. From diverse texts, I develop a genealogical narrative supplemented through memory work. This ‘gathering and re-using’ privileges Black women's theorising as a crucial component of the methodological metissage, which includes auto-theorising to develop ideas of resemblance in relation to Black British feminism and feminist kinship. The resultant ‘braiding’, I suggest after Lionnet, questions the absence of intersubjective spaces for reflection on Black British feminist praxis, indicating a direction for British feminists of all complexions. Attentive to the 1980s as historical context while invoking the maternal, I consider what is required to engage generationally, counterwrite the academy and pursue a dynamic process of transformation within a transnational feminism that challenges Black British absence from academic knowledge production, while nurturing its presence. (shrink)

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)

This study examines how people engage with the dynamic environment of the dog park in the face of unclear or ambiguous rules and emergent norms. Using participant observation, the analysis shows how, in the formal dog park, caretakers become “control managers” who must negotiate problems related to a variety of dog behaviors, especially mounting, aggression, and waste management. In this process, caretakers use various strategies to manage their own and others’ possible perceptions and understandings of appropriate behavior for dogs in (...) public places. (shrink)

I defend the view that we should not overintellectualize the mind. Nonhuman animals can occupy islands of practical rationality: they can have contextbound reasons for action even though they lack full conceptual abilities. Holism and the possibility of mistake are required for such reasons to be the agent's reasons, but these requirements can be met in the absence of inferential promiscuity. Empirical work with animals is used to illustrate the possibility that reasons for action could be bound to symbolic or (...) social contexts, and connections are made to simulationist accounts of cognitive skills. (shrink)

I defend the view that we should not overintellectualize the mind. Nonhuman animals can occupy islands of practical rationality: they can have context‐bound reasons for action even though they lack full conceptual abilities. Holism and the possibility of mistake are required for such reasons to be the agent's reasons, but these requirements can be met in the absence of inferential promiscuity. Empirical work with animals is used to illustrate the possibility that reasons for action could be bound to symbolic or (...) social contexts, and connections are made to simulationist accounts of cognitive skills. (shrink)

The construction and use of space is highly structuring in the lives of household members of both human and non-human animals. The choice of social practice is embedded in the ways in which both human and non-human animals physically organize the world around them. The architectural vestiges of houses—both in terms of the distribution of material culture within and surrounding them, and architectural choices—provide frameworks for a social practice that was shared between humans and living, domestic animals, or animal (...) materiality. The notion of meeting points is explored via both its tangible and metaphorical aspects to approach the meetings—the physical performances and their significance—of humans and animals in the past. To gauge the potential likenesses and differences, two case studies are compared from the Late Bronze Age in Scandinavia and Early Iron Age in Sicily. Both case studies represent societies where domestic animals were present and formed part of the household subsistence. A framework is presented that takes into consideration the spatial potential of allowing human-animal relationships to unfold within the framework of the everyday social practice of the household. (shrink)

This article is a summary of two chapters of a book published in French in 1997, entitled Comment L'esprit vient aux Bêtes, Paris, Gallimard. The core idea is that the crucial distinction between internal and external states, often used uncritically by theorists of intentionality, needs to be made on a non-circular basis. The proposal is that objectivity - the capacity to reidentify individuals as the same across places and times depends on the capacity to extract spatial crossmodal invariants, which in (...) turn presupposes a capacity to (re)calibrate perceptual inputs across modalities in a principled way. (shrink)

The phenomenology of home requires a differing notion of embodiment, perception, space/time, imagination, and animality. Home is in lived space, a deep psychic structure, and a dialogue with built structures and the natural world. Home requires cultivation that can increase our sense of belonging, shelter, direction and purpose. Home shows us trajectories of the back and forth dialogue with the inanimate world, deep past, ancestors, qualities of the things, animals and the natural world. Home is key to dwelling in space (...) in a centered way and appropriating the deep past. The meaning of home can lead to social efforts at providing homes and deepening ecological and historical awareness. (shrink)

Hurley is right to reject the dichotomy between intentional agents and mere stimulus/response habit machines, and she is also right in thinking that it is important to map the space of systems for the adaptive control of behaviour. So there is much in this paper with which I agree. My disagreement concerns folk psychology. Hurley thinks that control space can be charted by asking whether and to what extent animals are intentional agents. In contrast, I doubt that the concepts of (...) folk psychology, especially folk psychology construed as an interpretative practice, are the right mapping tools. If the main function of folk psychology is to make sense of one another, coordinate joint action, or make decisions about moral and legal responsibility, then there is no point in applying folk psychological notions to nonhuman minds. These interpretative functions simply do not arise for our interaction with nonhuman minds, and if folk psychology serves largely as a social tool serving them, there is no need to apply it to nonhumans, nor is there a reasonable expectation that we can usefully do so. If folk psychology does not even carve our sensing and control mechanisms at the joints, if it is not a good theory of human cognitive architecture, then it is not likely to be wellsuited for describing those of nonhuman agents. (shrink)

In recent years, with the development of society and the rapid development of the animation industry, people are paying more and more attention to and requirements for animation production. As an indispensable part of animation production, picture composition plays a major role in animation production. It can give full play to the application of color matching and light and shadow design and enhance the depth and space of the animation screen. Tone space conversion refers to the conversion or representation of (...) color data in one color space into corresponding data in another color space. Its purpose is to distinguish and process color components such as hue and saturation in an image. This article first introduces the domestic and foreign research status of digital image preprocessing and analyzes the basic principles of several color space conversions in detail. Then, several color space conversion algorithms are studied, and the performance of the algorithms is compared and analyzed. The paper focuses on the hardware implementation and optimization of the algorithm for converting RGB color space into HSI color space to meet the real-time requirements. This article focuses on the mutual conversion between the RGB tone space and the HSI tone space and describes in detail how each color component in the HSI tone space is converted from the three RGB color components from a geometric perspective, and then the conversion is derived, and several general conversion methods of RGB to HSI tone space are introduced; two conversion methods of geometric derivation method and standard modulus algorithm are implemented in the software, and the comparison verification is carried out, and the comparison is made from the perspective of hardware implementation. The pros and cons of the two methods are discussed. Finally, the paper summarizes the shortcomings in the design and proposes further research directions in the future. (shrink)

Landmarks play a crucial role in bootstrapping both spatial and temporal cognition. Given the similarity in the underlying demands of representing spatial and temporal relations, we ask here whether animals can be trained to reason about temporal relations by providing them with temporal landmark cues, proposing a line of future research complementary to those suggested by the authors.

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Hurley is right to reject the dichotomy between intentional agents and mere stimulus/response habit machines, and she is also right in thinking that it is important to map the space of systems for the adaptive control of behaviour. So there is much in this paper with which I agree. My disagreement concerns folk psychology. Hurley thinks that control space can be charted by asking whether and to what extent animals are intentional agents. In contrast, I doubt that the concepts of (...) folk psychology, especially folk psychology construed as an interpretative practice, are the right mapping tools. If the main function of folk psychology is to make sense of one another, co‐ordinate joint action, or make decisions about moral and legal responsibility, then there is no point in applying folk psychological notions to nonhuman minds. These interpretative functions simply do not arise for our interaction with non‐human minds, and if folk psychology serves largely as a social tool serving them, there is no need to apply it to non‐humans, nor is there a reasonable expectation that we can usefully do so. If folk psychology does not even carve our sensing and control mechanisms at the joints, if it is not a good theory of human cognitive architecture, then it is not likely to be well‐suited for describing those of nonhuman agents. (shrink)

While differentialists deny that non-linguistic animals can have a sense of justice, assimilationists credit some animals with such an advanced moral attitude. We approach this debate from a philosophical perspective. First, we outline the history of the notion of justice in philosophy and how various facets of that notion play a role in contemporary empirical investigations of justice among humans. On this basis, we develop a scheme for the elements of justice-relevant situations and for criteria of justice that should be (...) fruitful in studying both humans and animals. Furthermore, we investigate the conceptual connections between a sense of justice, on the one hand, and various other mental powers, on the other, and indicate which of the latter may be beyond the ken of animals. Next, we consider recent empirical research on justicerelated phenomena in animals. We argue for an intermediate position: While animals can at least in principle satisfy some preconditions of justice (intentional action, rulefollowing), others are problematic, notably possessing a notion of desert. A space for justice in social animals exists, yet it is rather limited compared to the rich cultures of justice in humans. Finally, we reflect on some actual or alleged implications of research on animal justice. As regards justice in humans, one should avoid a simplistic image of ‘‘natural justice’’ as boiling down to equal allocation of goods. As regards justice for animals, one should be weary of the contractualist assumption that only those capable of justice themselves are deserving of ‘‘just’’ treatment. (shrink)

A study of the organization of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) rituals in time and space illuminates a postulated mechanism on shifting focus in action parsing, from mid-ranged actions to finer movements (gestures). Performance of OCD rituals also involves high concentration rather than the automated, less attended performance of rituals in normal and stereotyped behaviors in animals and humans. (Published Online February 8 2007).

My commentary on Hurley is concerned with foundational issues. Hurley's investigation of animal cognition is cast within a particular framework—basically, a philosophically refined version of folk psychology. Her discussion has a complicated relationship to unresolved debates about the nature and status of folk psychology, especially debates about the extent to which folk psychological categories are aimed at picking out features of the causal organization of the mind.

Sociology and Animals : Beginnings -- Animals and Biology as Destiny -- Animals, Social Inequalities and Oppression -- Animals, Crime and Abuse -- Town and Country : Animals, Space and Place -- Consumption of the Animal -- Animals, Leisure and Culture -- Animal Experiments and Animal Rights -- Conclusion: Sociology for Other Animals.

When entering an environment, animals – including humans – tend to consult their memories to determine what they know about the place. This information is useful to determine: is this place safe? And what happens next? In this chapter, we argue on both empirical and conceptual grounds that memory is largely organized by space. Spatial relations determine what is recalled and which experiences are combined in generalizations. Time does not play an analogous role. We show that space and time in (...) memory are thus deeply asymmetrical. We conclude with a consequence of our view: spatial organization entails a basic form of abstraction in a way temporal organization does not, and so the spatial organization of memory reveals that memory involves generalization from the very beginning. (shrink)

Animals and Business Ethics is an edited book that applies business ethical theory to nonhuman animals. It explores the ethics of commodifying animals in a business context, how stakeholder and social contract theories relate to animals, how business can be regulated to improve conditions for animals, how to create more humane jobs for humans and animals, and the linkages between human and animal well-being, in the context of human workers and consumers who interact with animals in business. Business ethics (...) literature has underrepresented animals, although this is beginning to change. This book is an introduction to how business ethics theory can be applied, through a range of theoretical chapters and case studies. Animals and Business Ethics is a valuable contribution to the literature, which opens space for additional research. (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)

In a surface-dwelling animal like the rat, experimental strategies for investigating the hippocampal correlates of three-dimensional space appear inevitably complicated by the interplay of global versus local reference frames. We discuss the impact of the resulting confounds on present and future empirical analysis of the hypothesis by Jeffery and colleagues.

Many theorists of the ‘political turn’ in animal rights theory emphasize the need for animals’ interests to be considered in political decision-making processes, but deny that this requires self-representation and participation by animals themselves. I argue that participation by domesticated animals in co-authoring our shared world is indeed required, and explore two ways to proceed: 1) by enabling animal voice within the existing geography of human-animal roles and relationships; and 2) by freeing animals into a revitalized public (...) commons where citizens encounter one another in spontaneous, unpredictable encounters in spaces that they can re-shape together. (shrink)

This meta-study applies a socio-semiotic framework combining five basic communicational aspects, form, content, act, time, and space, developed to help answering the questionCan animals refer?It further operates with four levels, sign, utterance, genre, and lifeworld, studying relations between utterance and genre in particular. Semantic key terms found in an excerpted ‘resource collection’ consisting of three anthologies, two academic journals, and a monography, studying content in animal communication, are inspected, and discussed, especially information, functional reference, and reference. Since a temporary (...) inspection concluded that the field seems unable to give convincing joint answers, the scope of the meta-study was extended to include critical investigations of implicit communicational epistemologies applied in the sources. Two major challenges were brought to surface. Firstly, the problem of conflicting interrelatedness in animal utterances (parts versus whole). Positioning analyses revealed that theories and project-designs were mostly dyadic, prioritising form/content, content/function, or function/form, and rarely form/content/function, as a whole. The second concerned the issue of functional openness of animal communication systems. The meta-study found that more recent studies tend to reduce an essentialist search for ‘clear’ categories in favor of more complex designs, where focus is less on references in utterances as such and more on a species’ communicational system. This shift in turn leads to a problematisation of the role of context, kinds of communication (life-genres) and semantic levels in animal utterances, in other words, on animal communication for particular species as a whole. (shrink)

This Open Access book provides both a broad perspective and a focused examination of cow care as a subject of widespread ethical concern in India, and increasingly in other parts of the world. In the face of what has persisted as a highly charged political issue over cow protection in India, intellectual space must be made to bring the wealth of Indian traditional ethical discourse to bear on the realities of current human-animal relationships, particularly those of humans with cows. (...) Dharma, yoga, and bhakti paradigms serve as starting points for bringing Hindu--particularly Vaishnava Hindu--animal ethics into conversation with contemporary Western animal ethics. The author argues that a culture of bhakti--the inclusive, empathetic practice of spirituality centered in Krishna as the beloved cowherd of Vraja--can complement recently developed ethics-of-care thinking to create a solid basis for sustaining all kinds of cow care communities. (shrink)

The disciplinary enterprises engaged in the study of consciousness now extend beyond their original paradigms providing additional knowledge toward an overall understanding of the fundamental meaning and scope of consciousness. A new transdisciplinary domain has resulted from the syncretism of several approaches bringing about a new paradigm. The background for this overarching enterprise draws from a variety of traditions. In this paper however elaboration is restricted to the quantum-mechanical account in David Bohm’s theoretical work in relation to his ideas about (...) “active information”, “protointelligence”, and “non-locality”. This leads to an adapted version of Bohm’s thesis concerning the implicate order and explicate order of the Universe - the Impression Order and the Expression Order, respectively. On this view, the Universe is formed on an actual-material level, the apparent properties of things, and a potential-material level, a constant process of becoming that exerts an attractive force on the present. The central thesis emerges from a radical reformulation of certain core concepts that transforms many ontological assumptions about the material basis of consciousness. That is, the above platform inclusively connects to a hypothesis that the concepts of ‘space’, ‘time’, ‘event’, and ‘motion’ can be unified to capture the notion of simultaneous activity at reducing levels to the Impression order. This notion coheres with a physical-theoretical model of Signature-Energy-Frequency which has been well demonstrated in the atomic, chemical, and information fields. This study embraces a holistic and creative worldview based on a triadic model wherein consciousness itself is postulated as the most basic, primordial stratum. Importantly, both orders are constantly conjoined since the Impression Order exists as potential energy of the quantum vacuum. The physical realm is formed by the proposed Triangulate-Three conditions as a principle of animation and ‘being’: Consciousness, Body-of-Experience and Intellect-Reflective in the Expression Order, one aspect of which emerge as lifelike properties. This Triangulate-Three principle inheres in every particle and organism to which it guides its development, adaptation, and survival. The conscious being thus possesses all three conditions in Expression Order through STEM-interactions via SEF transmissions, as a self-organising organism. (shrink)

What is the relationship between space and time in the human mind? Studies in adults show an asymmetric relationship between mental representations of these basic dimensions of experience: Representations of time depend on space more than representations of space depend on time. Here we investigated the relationship between space and time in the developing mind. Native Greek‐speaking children watched movies of two animals traveling along parallel paths for different distances or durations and judged the spatial and temporal aspects of these (...) events (e.g., Which animal went for a longer distance, or a longer time?). Results showed a reliable cross‐dimensional asymmetry. For the same stimuli, spatial information influenced temporal judgments more than temporal information influenced spatial judgments. This pattern was robust to variations in the age of the participants and the type of linguistic framing used to elicit responses. This finding demonstrates a continuity between space‐time representations in children and adults, and informs theories of analog magnitude representation. (shrink)

Despite the many contributions of nonhuman animals in history, nonhuman animal representations are seldom crafted with care and accuracy in curricular texts. Because of the anthropocentric vantage point of textbook creation, the nonhuman animal is often portrayed as an object, but as our relationship with the nonhuman world continues to deteriorate, we need now more than ever to consider the agency and subjectivity of nonhuman entities across time and space. In this article, I will use critical contextual analysis (...) as a research method to examine the representation of the horse in a commonly used textbook in middle and high schools in the United States titled World History: Patterns of Interaction to raise larger questions about how to engage with nonhuman animal presence in history with students. Using critical animal studies as a theoretical framework to illuminate the data, the findings reveal that the horse is depicted as agentless and is shown merely as a means for human animals to expand empire and perpetuate social norms. The exploration identifies a gap in the social studies scholarship that neglects the historical contributions of nonhuman animals in curriculum. This article will argue that juxtaposing anthropocentric curricular texts such as the one under investigation with narratives that illuminate nonhuman animal subjectivity is essential for building a more empathetic world and for cultivating a more inclusive historical narrative. (shrink)

From 1957 to 1973, Barcelona Zoo was transformed from a small-scale, antiquated establishment harboring very few animals, a place that was still in a poor condition following the Spanish Civil War, into a new, larger, modern, and internationally recognized institution that included up-to-date animal enclosures and that boasted one of the first dolphinariums in Europe, as well as a famous white gorilla as its icon. From its very beginning, this renovation involved an intense popularization campaign. In this paper, by (...) describing the public discourse generated throughout this transformation and by analyzing the roles played by Antoni Jonch, the director of the zoo at that time; Josep Maria de Porcioles, the then-mayor of Barcelona; and General Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator who was head of state during this period, I will highlight how the context of the dictatorship not only authorized the new Barcelona Zoo but is, in fact, crucial to its understanding. The narratives that surrounded the renovation of the zoo focused on its civic and educational purpose, with a firm emphasis on modernity. The zoo was a modern space for learning about animals in order to become better people. These narratives were not only suitable to the policies, ideas, and aims of Porcioles’ City Council and Franco’s dictatorial regime; in fact, they completely matched them. Both local and national governments benefited from the restructuring of Barcelona Zoo and from its public discourse as a tool for social control and an instrument for their own propaganda, legitimation, and perpetuation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind by Peter Godfrey-SmithMichael BrownMetazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind BY PETER GODFREY-SMITH New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020Carrying forward the project he began in Other Minds (2016), Peter Godfrey-Smith aims in Metazoa (2020) to cast light on the problem of consciousness by inviting meditation on the minds of our distant deep-sea cousins. To (...) elaborate on the Nagelian question of what it’s like to be a bat, he asks what it is like to be a crab, a shrimp, or a cephalopod. One will not find here the dense and fine-grain argumentation that is characteristic of academic monographs, but instead a freer exploration of ideas ranging from marine biology, to philosophy of mind, to animal psychology. Godfrey-Smith’s more modest goal is not to argue definitively for a single viewpoint, but to acclimate the reader to the challenging conceptual-shift he calls gradualism—namely, “the idea that in evolution, minds and experience come slowly into view, rather than appearing in a single move” (262).In the place of a barrage of observational data or dense philosophical argumentation, Godfrey-Smith paints a rich picture of the underwater environment, describes his personal interactions with the creatures that live there, and invites the reader to reflect on their activities and the cognition behind them. In this capacity, he walks a fine line—not anthropomorphizing the creatures, but presenting their actions as mentally agnostic as possible—to let the reader consider how much mental unity there might be, or how much self-or other-awareness may or may [End Page 130] not be present behind the beady mollusk eyes. Nevertheless, he strives to acquaint us with creatures we otherwise might not engage with. The several drawings of the animals and settings Godfrey-Smith discusses throughout the book aid this goal, as well as eight pages of vibrant photographs featuring several of the book’s “characters.”Because minds are things formed over time, Godfrey-Smith takes us through the first fossil evidence of animals in the Ediacaran, the appearance of shrimp-like ancestors in the Cambrian, the vast increase in size of the Ordovician, and the appearance of the octopus and dinosaurs of the Mesozoic. Yet, minds also develop under pressure and conditions of their environment, so Godfrey-Smith takes us on his dives to consider what environmental conditions led to the development of these submarine minds. As such, the text inventively winds its way across dimensions of space, time, and a variety of academic disciplines.In advancing the gradualist thesis, Godfrey-Smith entertains the Aristotelian notion of continuity between life and mind, as opposed to Descartes’ firm dualism. In this way, as noted in chapter 2, when a cell establishes its boundaries and controls the traffic of ions in and out, it becomes a kind of self. This leads him to a discussion of the glass sponge, multicellular but structurally simple, and yet a “collector and curator of biological light,” referring to its ability to channel light like a fiber optic cable (47). Chapter 3 considers the cnidarians—corals, in particular—in which the first signs of animal action appear. This action, like grasping, requires the appearance of a nervous system, and this increased complexity seems to give rise to agency, and more particularly, subjecthood. Chapter 4 invites us to consider the crab to guide reflections on early animal sensation. Of particular interest to this investigation are signs of feeling pain, such as the release of painkillers and the tending of wounds. Surprisingly, scientists find such behavior in shrimp. Chapter 5 returns to more philosophical considerations, attempting to stitch up false dichotomies of self-awareness and other-awareness, and activity and passivity, to name a couple. This sets the stage for chapter 6’s examination of the mysterious mix of mental unity and disunity in the octopus. With a decentralized nervous system, each arm seems to have a mind of its own, yet the creature nevertheless acts to unified purposes. Godfrey-Smith considers the resemblance to split-brain cases in humans, and the copresence of unified and disunified experience in... (shrink)

Currently, there is no non-anthropocentric guide to the practice of nature conservation and the treatment of invasive species and domestic animals. In examining the so-called ‘ecocentric’ and ‘animal’ ethics, we highlight some differences between them, and argue that the basic aspiration for support of all nonhuman life needs to be retained. We maintain that hierarchies of value need to be flexible, establishing basic principles and then weighing up the options in the context of anthropocentrism, industrial development and human population (...) growth. Acknowledging the role of these conditions creates space for combining individual-based and collective-based ethics in practice. (shrink)

In his new book Animals and African Ethics, Kai Horsthemke examines whether an African morality can be extended to include animal rights. He argues that the African ethical systems of ubuntu and ukama, because they are anthropocentric at heart, do not adequately make space for animal rights. In his defense of animal rights, Horsthemke responds to arguments claiming that there is a difference between racism and speciesism, and that the latter is morally justifiable even though the former (...) is not. I examine this discussion and agree with Horsthemke that the arguments in favor of speciesism are weak. I defend the claim that—like racism—speciesism is morally unjustifiable. (shrink)

The size of animal exhibits has important effects on their lives and welfare. However, most references to exhibit size only consider floor space and height dimensions, without considering the space afforded by usable features within the exhibit. In this paper, we develop two possible methods for measuring the usable space of zoo exhibits and apply these to a sample exhibit. Having a metric for usable space in place will provide a better reflection of the quality of different exhibits, and (...) enhance comparisons between exhibits. (shrink)

Schopenhauer’s philosophical engagement with Spinoza spreads over many fronts, and an adequate – not to say, complete – treatment of the topic, should cover at least the following issues: Schopenhauer’s critique (and misunderstanding) of Spinoza’s pivotal concept of causa sui; Schopenhauer’s claim that Spinoza confused reason [ratio] and cause [causa]; the relationship between Schopenhauer’s and Spinoza’s monisms; the eminent role that both philosophers assign to causality; and finally, Schopenhauer’s view of the world as a macroanthropos, as opposed to Spinoza’s attack (...) on anthropomorphic thinking. An attempt to reconstruct a genuine philosophical dialogue between Schopenhauer and Spinoza should begin by setting the record straight and clarifying the former’s mis-readings of the latter (and there are quite a few of this kind ). We could also benefit from comparing Schopenhauer’s reception of Spinoza’s with that of Schopenhauer’s German contemporaries. Regrettably our space here is limited and so if we wish to treat any of the issues in any depth, we must restrict the scope of the current chapter. For this reason, I have decided to concentrate on two central issues: animal rights (Part I) and evil (Part II). These issues are, clearly, at least as important as the others listed above. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungTrotz seiner großen Verbreitung in den Lebenswissenschaften wurde dem Aquarium bisher wenig wissenschafts- und technikhistorische Aufmerksamkeit zuteil. Dies ist nicht zuletzt durch den Umstand begründet, dass das Aquarium und seine Geschichte bisher größtenteils als außerwissenschaftlich aufgefasst wurden. Dabei spielen so unterschiedliche Kontexte wie Akklimatisierung, Amateurnaturkunde und bürgerliche Populärkultur eine wichtige Rolle. Gleichzeitig ist die Entwicklung des Aquariums aber auch eng mit der Geschichte der Lebenswissenschaften verbunden. Mit Blick auf die zweite Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts verstehe ich das Aquarium als techno-natural (...) assemblage, in der Technologie, Kultur und Natur zu einem künstlichen Naturraum verbunden sind. Seine Geschichte beginnt in der britischen Amateurnaturkunde und der französischen Akklimatisierungsbewegung. Im Deutschland des späten 19. Jahrhunderts entwickelte sich das Aquarium zu einem Massenphänomen. Gleichzeitig hielt es Einzug in die Lebenswissenschaften, wo es als Einfallstor, Instrument und Umwelt Verwendung fand. Wie sich zeigt, ist das Aquarium eine hochgradig konstruierte Technologie, die sich aus einer Verbindung unterschiedlicher Traditionen herausgebildet und das Leben in die Lebenswissenschaften gebracht hat. (shrink)

What we could call ‘relational non-interventionism’ holds that we have no general obligation to alleviate animal suffering, and that we do not typically have special obligations to alleviate wild animals’ suffering. Therefore, we do not generally have a duty to intervene in nature to alleviate wild animal suffering. However, there are a range of relationships that we may have with wild animals that do generate special obligations to aid – and the consequences of these obligations can be surprising. (...) In this paper, I argue that we have special obligations to those animals we have historically welcomed or encouraged into our spaces. This includes many wild animals. One of the consequences of this is that we may sometimes possess obligations to actively prevent rewilding – or even to dewild – for the sake of welcomed animals who thrive in human-controlled spaces. (shrink)

Through the reconstruction of Leibniz's theory of the degrees of knowledge, this e-book investigates and explores the intrinsic relationship of imagination with space and time. The inquiry into this relationship defines the logic of imagination that characterizes both human and non-human animals, albeit differently, making them two different species of imaginative animals. -/- Lucia Oliveri explains how the emergence of language in human animals goes hand in hand with the emergence of thought and a different form of rationality constituted by (...) logical inferences based on identity and contradiction, principles that are out of reach of the imagination. The e-book concludes that the presence of innate principles in human animals transforms the way in which they sense-perceive the world, thereby constantly increasing the distinction between human and non-human animals. -/- Keywords: human and non-human animals, Leibniz and Locke on ideas, Leibniz on bodies, Leibniz on conceivability, Leibniz on degrees of knowledge, Leibniz on degrees of perception, Leibniz on innate ideas, Leibniz on modality, Leibniz on similarity and congruence, Leibniz on space and time, Leibniz’s philosophy of language, theory of types. (shrink)

Over the course of the twentieth century, the number of productive nonhuman animals in Australian cities declined dramatically. This decline resulted—at least in part—from an imaginative geography, in which productive animals were deemed inappropriate occupants of urban spaces. A class-based prioritization of amenity, privacy, order, and the protection of real property values—as well as a gender order within which animal-keeping was not recognized as a legitimate economic activity for women—shaped this imaginative geography of animals that found its most (...) critical expression in local government regulations. However, there were different imaginative geographies among women and men—mostly those from the working class—whose emotional and economic relationships with productive animals led them to advocate for those animals as legitimate and desirable urban inhabitants. (shrink)

Animals populate our artistic and philosophical discourses in critical ways. From Jacques Derrida's or Karen Barad's cat, to Donna Haraway's dog, to the fish in Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan, these animals feature heavily in discussions regarding limits – the limits of the human and thus its relation with non-humans, but also the limits of knowledge itself. Cute or dangerous, real or fantasised, dead or alive: in this article, I juxtapose the various ways that such animals confront us with (...) what Jacques Derrida describes as “the point of view of the absolute other”. Similarly, recent texts stage encounters with animals – thus distributing agency towards a larger variety of beings, carving out space for a previously excluded non-human other. Yet these encounters are mediated in profoundly different ways. In researching how encounters with the animal are differentially inflected and “defracted” respective to the medium in which they are staged, this article invokes questions of form and style within the critical dialogue that attempts to centre non-human animals. Highlighting how formal decisions are not accidental, but rather integral, to the praxis of the philosophy of animality, this article aims to draw attention to how specific forms and styles allow for a moment of contact with a non-human other. To this end, this article examines three oft-cited encounters: Derrida's encounter with his cat, an intense stare with a fish in Leviathan, and Barad's inflection of Schrödinger's cat. This juxtaposition gives insight into the limits of certain styles of producing thought and critically reflects on these works in their discussion of non-human life and agency. (shrink)

Human beings are both needy and dignified. How should we think about the relationship between our neediness and our worth? Card argues well that our vulnerability to luck is intertwined in the very conditions of moral agency. We can see the merit of her approach even more clearly by turning to some difficulties the Stoics have in preserving dignity while removing vulnerability. Stoicism does, however, help us to sort through the difficulties involved as we try to combine love of particular (...) people with respect for all human life. Richardson is correct to suggest that love itself can animate the concern for all humanity; I also agree with him that institutions must play a major role in any solution to problems of inequality between nations. Although the “capabilities approach” offers an attractive account of one part of the goal of just political institutions, combining, as Moody‐Adams suggests, respect for difference with a commitment to universal norms, I now believe that the capabilities account should be combined with a form of Rawlsian political liberalism that protects spaces within which citizens may pursue the good as they understand it. (shrink)

With a novel approach to Aristotle's zoology, this study looks at animals as creatures of nature and reveals a scientific discourse that, in response to his predecessors, exiles logos as reason and pursues the logos intrinsic to animals' bodies empowering them to sense the world and live. The volume explores Aristotle's conception of animals through a discussion of his ad hoc methodology to study them, including the pertinence of the soul to such a study, and the rise of zoology as (...) a branch of natural philosophy. For Aristotle, animal life stems from the body in the space of existence and revolves around sensation, which is entwined with pleasure, pain, and desire. Lack of human reason is irrelevant to an understanding of the richness of animal life and cognition. In sum, the reader will acquire knowledge of the animal as such, which lay at the core of Aristotle's agenda and required a study of its own, separate from plants and the elements. This book is intended for students of history of science, ancient biology and philosophy and all those who, from different fields, are interested in animal studies and the human/animal relation. (shrink)

The posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is the most likely site where egocentric spatial relationships are represented in the brain. PPC cells receive visual, auditory, somaesthetic, and vestibular sensory inputs; oculomotor, head, limb, and body motor signals; and strong motivational projections from the limbic system. Their discharge increases not only when an animal moves towards a sensory target, but also when it directs its attention to it. PPC lesions have the opposite effect: sensory inattention and neglect. The PPC does not (...) seem to contain a “map” of the location of objects in space but a distributed neural network for transforming one set of sensory vectors into other sensory reference frames or into various motor coordinate systems. Which set of transformation rules is used probably depends on attention, which selectively enhances the synapses needed for making a particular sensory comparison or aiming a particular movement. (shrink)

Cimatti and Salzani have put together a rich collection of essays on animal studies that provides an exhaustive overview of how Italian contemporary philosophers are engaging with animal ethics, antispeciesism, posthumanism, ecofeminism, and biopolitics. This edited volume represents an important development in the “animal turn” in the humanities, particularly because it is published in English, allowing for a more efficient dialogue between “Italian theory” and philosophers around the world. This is, in fact, the first collection that will (...) give an international audience access to the rich and varied contribution of Italian contemporary philosophy in the burgeoning field of animal studies. It is also important to point out that all the authors—who are either well-established erudite thinkers or bright and innovative new voices in the panorama of Italian philosophy—effectively engage with recent and prominent scholarship in the fields of animal studies, posthumanism, and biopolitics, such as the work of Zizek, Esposito, Hardt, Calarco, Braidotti, and Wolfe.The volume is clearly intended for an academic audience: professors, scholars, and graduate students studying not only philosophy, Italian studies, environmental humanities, and animal ethics, but also political science, ethology, comparative literature, art history, and religious studies. In addition, the book could also find an audience in animal rights and environmental activists who are interested in the philosophical aspects and ethical and political implications of their actions.The division of the book into three sections (“Animality in the Italian Tradition,” “Animality in Perspective,” and “Fragments of a Contemporary Debate”) provides the reader a clear trajectory from the Italian philosophical tradition to the current debate on “animality.” In the first section, in fact, the authors engage with the rich and complex tradition of both Italian animal philosophy and advocacy. In the three essays that make up this section, the authors provide a compelling historical perspective of the anti-Cartesian and antidualistic aspects of Italian thought, tracing its pre-Cartesian origin and post-Cartesian developments through the work of Francis of Assisi, Dante Alighieri, Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Vico, and Giacomo Leopardi, among others. This section also includes essays outlining the development of animal bioethics in Italy, which emerged from the work of animal advocacy pioneer Aldo Capitini and continued to have an important impact on Italian culture thanks to the antispeciesist movement and debate, of which the third essay of this section provides an exhaustive intellectual history.The second section of the volume, comprised of six essays, provides an overall view of the ongoing philosophical debate on animality that traverses Italian posthumanism, feminism, theology, biopolitics, environmental ethics, and Marxist thought. Here the authors engage with some of the prominent voices in the contemporary Italian philosophical landscape, such as Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Roberto Marchesini, Antonio Negri, Maria Turchetto, Adriana Caravero, Luisa Muraro, and Paolo De Benedetti. As pointed out by the editors in their introduction, this section does not intend to offer a complete account of the extensive and heterogenous exchanges occurring inside the Italian biological turn, but instead aims at investigating its most compelling approaches and effectively links them to the ongoing transnational debate.The rich historiography and analysis of the first two sections is complemented, in the third section of the volume, by the speculative approach that strongly characterizes all five final essays. Here we can find some of the most exciting and original developments in Italian scholarship on animal philosophy. This section is, therefore, the most effective in presenting the distinctive approach of contemporary Italian philosophers in rethinking animality and the human-animal interplay, in particular inside the historical and epistemological frame of the Anthropocene. For instance, Massimo Filippi explores how slaughterhouses have become exemplary spaces to investigate the calculation that adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides humans and animals, which removes animality and excises the other, which forcefully bans any imagining of the monstrously other, of the other-than-human, and that produces, among others and besides It-Self, the Woman, the Homosexual, the Abnormal, the Migrant, the Criminal, and the Animal. (p. 225)Structuring his argument on the real and metaphorical “mathematics of sacrifice” at work in the slaughterhouse (p. 226), Filippi engages with the processes that enable human ontological privilege, with intraspecific and interspecific mechanisms of discrimination, and with philosophical, political, and ethical implications of meat production.For a second and final example, ethologist Roberto Marchesini—one of the most original and prominent voices in animal studies—focuses on redefining the paradigm of “animality.” In his essay, Marchesini questions behaviorism and the automatism of learning, key aspects that have been prominent in defining animality in many fields, from biology to philosophy. Building from his groundbreaking and extensive work in ethology and zooanthropology, he argues for an “elaborative model” of animality (animal as subject) against the fallacy of the “automatism-based model” (animal as mechanism): Subjectivity is the implicit condition of the animal being, an expressive dimension that may also be unconscious but that precedes from (i) a constructivist conception of behavior, which we could explain by considering it a work in progress, always open and never predetermined, but equally never imposed and nonetheless always co-factorial to external contributions, and (ii) a propositional view of the individual, or rather from being supported by verbal structures such as to delight, to fear, to want, which join themselves to modal predicates declined according to context, but which likewise render the individual the protagonist. (p. 247)Animal studies has established itself as one of the most exciting areas of research inside the biological turn of the humanities worldwide and, by collecting such a large number of compelling and provocative theories from Italian contemporary philosophy, the impact of Cimatti and Salzani's volume will be twofold: It will enrich and expand a developing discussion in the environmental humanities and in animal studies while establishing the centrality of Italian thought in such an important and, in the Anthropocene era, necessary debate. (shrink)

Camp (2009) distinguishes two varieties of conceptual recombination. One of them is full-blown or (as I prefer to call it) spontaneous recombination. The other is causal-counterfactual recombination. She suggests that while human animals recombine their concepts in a full-blown way, many non-human animals are capable of conceptual recombinability but only of the causal-counterfactual kind. In this paper, I argue that there is conceptual space to draw further sub-distinctions on how different animals may recombine their concepts. More specifically, I propose to (...) differentiate between a) narrow causal-counterfactual recombination; b) broad causal-counterfactual recombination; c) lean spontaneous recombination; d) robust spontaneous recombination. Afterwards, I focus on how these distinctions relate to several previous philosophical ideas on the representational capacities of non-human animals. I also provide several empirical examples suggesting that some animals display one or another of these four ways of recombining concepts, at least in some contexts. (shrink)

Although long treated as the human space par excellence, the city is in fact a vibrant ecosystem that is home to many more nonhuman animals than human ones. Nonetheless, the longstanding emphasis on the city as human built environment and human center of culture has occluded extensive study of it as a thriving ecosystem in its own right. Ethology offers valuable tools for conducting a serious study of the zoological dimensions of urban areas. Companion and domestic animals such as dogs (...) and cats share domestic spaces. Synanthropes such as crows, raccoons, and coyotes are able to easily take advantage of areas around humans. And animals labeled as “pests,” such as rats and roaches, thrive in human buildings and on refuse. Indeed, such animals even play a key role in converting organic matter in the city and preventing its buildup. (shrink)

What we could call ‘relational non-interventionism’ holds that we have no general obligation to alleviate animal suffering, and that we do not typically have special obligations to alleviate wild animals’ suffering. Therefore, we do not usually have a duty to intervene in nature to alleviate wild animal suffering. However, there are a range of relationships that we may have with wild animals that do generate special obligations to aid—and the consequences of these obligations can be surprising. In this (...) paper, it is argued that we have special obligations to those animals we have historically welcomed or encouraged into our spaces. This includes many wild animals. One of the consequences of this is that we may sometimes possess obligations to actively prevent rewilding—or even to dewild—for the sake of welcomed animals who thrive in human-controlled spaces. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to show that in Merleau-Ponty’s lesser known works, one can find a path leading toward a phenomenology of the body that would not risk the “ambiguity of the flesh,” as The Visible and the Invisible is often charged with, but instead would sustain the ontology of nature that one finds in the “Working Notes” added to Merleau-Ponty’s last writings. Analyzing first his concept of nature, as it was developed in his courses at the Collège (...) de France, the proposed aim of this text is to question anthropological difference by focusing on Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the contemporary sciences, whereby the Ineinander between the physical, living, and human orders is re-founded by a new, negative concept of nature. By deconstructing classical ontology and its understanding of space, time, and objectivity, and by returning to the domain of perception, this new concept offers a novel way to reveal the advent of life in nature, its institution, and the emergence of a new corporeity in life itself. The model of Merleau-Ponty’s essential concept of institution becomes birth, and therefore the human body will no longer be interpreted as “one’s own body,” but rather will be understood, in a radically a-subjective way, as from, and based on, the participation of our perception with animality. Thereby, the concept of “ownness” becomes secondary; however, the notion of institution, established against the lexicon of consciousness and subjectivity, opens another sense of anthropological difference, one that is based only on the experiences of corporeity. (shrink)