Anthropocentrism and its discontents : the moral status of animals in the history of Western philosophy / Gary Steiner.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Steiner, Gary, 1956- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Animal welfare--Moral and ethical aspects.

Animal welfare.

Animal welfare--Religious aspects.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (345 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents is the first-ever comprehensive examination of views of animals in the history of Western philosophy, from Homeric Greece to the twentieth century.In recent decades, increased interest in this area has been accompanied by scholars' willingness to conceive of animal experience in terms of human mental capacities: consciousness, self-awareness, intention, deliberation, and in some instances, at least limited moral agency. This conception has been facilitated by a shift from behavioral to cognitive ethology (the science of animal behavior), and by attempts to affirm the essential similarities between the psychophysical makeup of human beings and animals. Gary Steiner sketches the terms of the current debates about animals and relates these to their historical antecedents, focusing on both the dominant anthropocentric voices and those recurring voices that instead assert a fundamental kinship relation between human beings and animals. He concludes with a discussion of the problem of balancing the need to recognize a human indebtedness to animals and the natural world with the need to preserve a sense of the uniqueness and dignity of the human individual.

Contents:

Contemporary debates on the status of animals

Epic and pre-Socratic thought

Aristotle and the Stoics : the evolution of a cosmic principle

Classical defenses of animals : Plutarch and Porphyry

The status of animals in medieval Christianity

Descartes on the moral status of animals

The empiricists, the utilitarians, and Kant

Conceptions of continuity : Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Schweitzer

Postmodern conceptions of the human-animal boundary

Rethinking the moral status of animals.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

"First paperback edition, 2010"--Title page verso

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780822961192

0822961199

9780822970989

0822970988

OCLC:

884586503