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How did humans respond to the eighteenth-century discovery of countless new species of animals? This book explores the gamut of human-animal interactions: from love to cultural identifications, moral reflections, philosophical debates, classification systems, mechanical copies, insults and literary creativity.
Improving welfare in farmed animals is good for productivity, consumer demand and, of course, the animals themselves. Covering the current scientific knowledge on the sensitivity and consciousness of animals, this translation of the Le Bien-être des animaux d'élevage series reviews how to understand, assess and then improve farm animal welfare. Beginning with the philosophical and legal history of the consideration of their well-being, it synthesizes this information to build a common reference so that we all share the same notion of what animal welfare actually is. It then evaluates the welfare assessment process, which must be as reliable and objective as possible and require the use of ...
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This book examines how the developments in veterinary science, philosophy, economics and law converged during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to entrench farm animals along a commodification pathway. It covers two neglected areas of study; the importance of international veterinary conferences to domestic regimes and the influence of early global treaties that dealt with animal health on domestic quarantine measures. The author concludes by arguing that society needs to reconsider its understanding and the place of the welfare paradigm in animal production systems. As it presently stands, this paradigm can be used to justify almost any self-serving reason to abrogate ethical principles. The topic of this book will appeal to a wide readership; not only scholars, students and educators but also people involved in animal production, interested parties and experts in the animal welfare and animal rights sector, as well as policy-makers and regulators, who will find this work informative and thought-provoking.
Our tendency to read French Enlightenment political writing from a narrow disciplinary perspective has obscured the hybrid character of political philosophy, rhetoric, and natural science in the period. As Michèle Duchet and others have shown, French Enlightenment thinkers developed a philosophical anthropology to support new political norms and models. This book explores how five important eighteenth-century French political authors—Rousseau, Diderot, La Mettrie, Quesnay, and Rétif de La Bretonne—also constructed a "political zoology" in their philosophical and literary writings informed by animal references drawn from Enlightenment natural history, science, and physiology. Drawing on theoretical work by Derrida, Latour, de Fontenay, and others, it shows how these five authors signed on to the old rhetorical tradition of animal comparisons in political philosophy, which they renewed via the findings and speculations of contemporary science. Engaging with recent scholarship on Enlightenment political thought, it also explores the links between their political zoologies and their family resemblance as "liberal" political thinkers.
Althusser delivered these lectures on Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality at the cole normale suprieure in Paris in 1972. They are fascinating for two reasons. First, they gave rise to a new generation of Rousseau scholars, attentive not just to Rousseau's ideas, but also to those of his concepts that were buried beneath metaphors or fictional situations and characters. Second, we are now discovering that the "late Althusser's" theses about aleatory materialism and the need to break with the strict determinism of theories of history in order to devise a new philosophy "for Marx" were being worked out well before 1985 in this reading of Rousseau dating from twelve years earlier, which introduces into Rousseau's text the ideas of the void, the accident, the take, and the necessity of contingency.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The triggers of laughter in spoken language or conversation can often be very simple, such as a change in gesture, or in vocal tone or tempo. Speakers and listeners understand these dynamics of gesture through motor cognition and use them to great effect. The causes of laughter and the experience of humor in written texts, however, are less well understood. In Kinesic Humor, Guillemette Bolens offers a cognitive poetics-based study of triggers of laughter in texts, foc...
Introduction -- 1. The Social Animal -- 2. The Sensitive Animal -- 3. Monkey Artists -- 4. The Language of Brutes -- 5. Animating Porcelain -- 6. The Soul of Matter Conclusion Bibliography Index.
Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008 The period of the Enlightenment saw great changes in the way animals were seen. The codifying and categorizing impulse of the age of reason saw sharp lines drawn between different animal species and between animals and humans. In 1600, "beasts" were still seen as the foils and adversaries of human reason. By 1800, animals had become exemplars of sentiment and compassion, the new standards of truth and morals. A new age had dawned, a time when humans admired animals and sought to recover their own animality. A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Enlightenment presents an overview of the period and continues with essays on the position of animals in contemporary symbolism, hunting, domestication, sports and entertainment, science, philosophy, and art.