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• W4327756711 abstract "Matthew Calarco surveys the history of philosophic thought on animals in The Boundaries of Human Nature: The Philosophical Animal from Plato to Haraway. Reimagining the traditional question of what human beings are, Calarco questions what animals are, speculating on how human-animal relationships could change in the future to be “more respectful and joyful” (p. viii). To accomplish this task, Calarco imagines philosophers from all time periods addressing contemporary ecological events, figures, and concerns. In the first chapter, Plato speaks on the fires that were set in the Amazon rain forest to convert acreage to land suitable for the farming and ranching of cattle; in the second chapter, Aristotle grapples with primatologist Jane Goodall on the question of whether animals wonder; and in the third chapter, Diogenes meets Timothy Treadwell, American bear enthusiast and filmmaker, for a discussion of what it means to live apart from human society. Throughout the book, Calarco makes it clear that he believes philosophy must figure prominently in any endeavor to reconfigure modern behavior toward animals—and to avoid the catastrophic repercussions of such behavior.The sixth chapter of The Boundaries of Human Nature—“Descartes's Beast-Machine”—provides a good indication of the arguments of the book more generally. In it, Descartes's notoriously reductive, mechanical vision of animals is challenged by Koko the gorilla. Koko, a western lowland gorilla, was taught American Sign Language by psychologist and caretaker Francine Patterson, adopting somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 signs and using them with other trained primates. Cartesian thought has it that animals are mere automata—that is, they are unable to use language in a variety of contexts and are thus separate from human beings. Calarco finds this distinction obvious, because humans certainly “use language in ways that far exceed Koko's ability,” but also misguided because the Cartesian approach fails to study animals “on their own terms,” always already devaluing animals by comparing them to human beings (pp. 63, 65). Calarco further calls on ethologist Nathan Lents, who redirects Cartesian thought to the linguistic similarities between humans and animals. In the end, language is shown to be perhaps always a question of difference in degree between humans and animals, not in kind.Later chapters focus on Carol J. Adams, Val Plumwood, and Donna Haraway. In The Sexual Politics of Meat, published in 1990, Adams connected the violence of animals to the violent treatment of women. Calarco addresses Adams's work in the 11th chapter, and he extends her insights to issues of race, citing contemporary work in both African and Colonialist studies to illustrate this point. Val Plumwood wrote on her experiences of being attacked by a crocodile and the “shocking reduction” that occurred as she “moved from being a unified human subject to being a piece of meat for another animal,” as Calarco relays in Chapter 12 (p. 126). And, in the last chapter of the book, Calarco explores the influence of Haraway's cyborg and its consequences for animal studies. These more recent thinkers provide a much needed addendum to the Western philosophical tradition's treatment of animals, which has been overwhelmingly anthropocentric. Calarco believes human exceptionalism must be confronted if any change is to be made to humanity's base behaviors toward animals and the natural world more generally.According to Calarco, this confrontation will undoubtedly use philosophy to enact change. As part of a larger shift in philosophic and literary studies which emphasizes the similarities between humans and animals, Calarco opts for the adjective “more-than-human” to describe animals. The point is to turn human exceptionalism on its head. Just as Plutarch's “Gryllus,” which Calarco focuses on in the fifth chapter, explains how animals are often far better at embodying so-called human virtues, we ought to recognize the way animals often exceed human capabilities. Calarco cites Barbara Smuts for the term “more-than-human world,” which Smuts herself originally borrowed from a 1996 book by David Abram titled The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. The use of “more-than-human” becomes a little confusing at times in Calarco's book, especially because it is occasionally used alongside “nonhuman animals” and “other-than-human beings.” In Chapter 9, for example, which focuses on Nietzsche's Übermensch—a term already bearing suprahuman implications—Calarco will juggle all three terms while also adding to the list Nietzsche's notion of the “all-too-human.”Regardless, Calarco's belief in philosophy's ability to enact change is refreshing, as is his writing. The bite-sized chapters pack impressive summaries of key philosophers who write on animals and place them inside contemporary ecological conversations and against contemporary concerns. Other chapters focus on Jainism, Kant, Bentham, and Derrida. The book predominantly caters to a popular audience in accordance with Calarco's belief that philosophy figures prominently in the effort to change human-animal relationships. Thus the book is an excellent introduction and survey of philosophical studies on animals while also providing novel and unexplored connections that other experts can certainly sink their teeth into." @default.
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• W4327756711 date "2023-04-01" @default.
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• W4327756711 title "The Boundaries of Human Nature: The Philosophical Animal from Plato to Haraway" @default.
• W4327756711 doi "https://doi.org/10.5406/21601267.13.1.12" @default.
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