Humans, Among Other Classical Animals

Humans, Among Other Classical Animals

Author: Ashley Clements

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-01-15

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 019285609X

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From the European assimilation and destruction of the New World to our present environmental destruction of our shared world, Humans, among Other Classical Animals demonstrates how the Classics have been implicated in the structures of thought that have ultimately led us to our present historical moment.


Humans, among Other Classical Animals

Humans, among Other Classical Animals

Author: Ashley Clements

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-12-16

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 0192668684

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We are living in a moment of environmental and existential crisis that demands a response. Why then study Classics now? From the European assimilation and destruction of the New World to our present environmental destruction of our shared world, Humans, among Other Classical Animals explores in encounters an answer by demonstrating how the Classics have been implicated in the structures of thought that have ultimately led us to our present historical moment. Telling the story of anthropology's Classical entanglements from its inception to its growth to critical self-awareness, it demonstrates that Classical ideas have played a crucial -and often deleterious- role in the Western placing of the human and in the discipline that claimed the study of humanity as its own. Responses to our present crisis, it argues, should therefore include as a prerequisite, considering the origins and implications of these Classical foundations because only by so doing can we attain the full self-awareness necessary to think beyond them and consider the alternatives we now need. Postclassical Interventions aims to reorient the meaning of antiquity across and beyond the humanities. Building on the success of Classical Presences, this complementary series features shorter-length monographs designed to provoke debate about the current and future potential of Classical Reception through fresh, bold, and critical thinking.


Humans and Other Animals

Humans and Other Animals

Author: Samantha Hurn

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9781849647267

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Explores the evolving and diverse ways in which humans and animals interact, from blood sports to pet keeping


The Animal and the Human in Ancient and Modern Thought

The Animal and the Human in Ancient and Modern Thought

Author: Stephen T. Newmyer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-01

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1135042845

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Ancient Greeks endeavored to define the human being vis-à-vis other animal species by isolating capacities and endowments which they considered to be unique to humans. This approach toward defining the human being still appears with surprising frequency, in modern philosophical treatises, in modern animal behavioral studies, and in animal rights literature, to argue both for and against the position that human beings are special and unique because of one or another attribute or skill that they are believed to possess. Some of the claims of man’s unique endowments have in recent years become the subject of intensive investigation by cognitive ethologists carried out in non-laboratory contexts. The debate is as lively now as in classical times, and, what is of particular note, the examples and methods of argumentation used to prove one or another position on any issue relating to the unique status of human beings that one encounters in contemporary philosophical or ethological literature frequently recall ancient precedents. This is the first book-length study of the ‘man alone of animals’ topos in classical literature, not restricting its analysis to Greco-Roman claims of man’s intellectual uniqueness, but including classical assertions of man’s physiological and emotional uniqueness. It supplements this analysis of ancient manifestations with an examination of how the commonplace survives and has been restated, transformed, and extended in contemporary ethological literature and in the literature of the animal rights and animal welfare movements. Author Stephen T. Newmyer demonstrates that the anthropocentrism detected in Greek applications of the ‘man alone of animals’ topos is not only alive and well in many facets of the current debate on human-animal relations, but that combating its negative effects is a stated aim of some modern philosophers and activists.


Human and Animal in Ancient Greece

Human and Animal in Ancient Greece

Author: Tua Korhonen

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-03-30

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1786731193

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Animals were omnipresent in the everyday life and the visual arts of classical Greece. In literature, too, they had significant functions.This book discusses the role of animals - both domestic and wild - and mythological hybrid creatures in ancient Greek literature. Challenging the traditional view of the Greek anthropocentrism, the authors provide a nuanced interpretation of the classical relationship to animals. Through a close textual analysis, they highlight the emergence of the perspective of animals in Greek literature. Central to the book's enquiry is the question of empathy: investigating the ways in which ancient Greek authors invited their readers to empathise with non-human counterparts. The book presents case studies on the animal similes in the Iliad, the addresses to animals and nature in Sophocles' Philoctetes, the human-bird hybrids in The Birds by Aristophanes and the animal protagonists of Anyte's epigrams. Throughout, the authors develop an innovative methodology that combines philological and historical analysis with a philosophy of embodiment, or phenomenology of the body. Shedding new light on how animals were regarded in ancient Greek society, the book will be of interest to classicists, historians, philosophers, literary scholars and all those studying empathy and the human-animal relationship.


Good Natured

Good Natured

Author: Frans B. M. DE WAAL

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0674033175

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To observe a dog's guilty look. to witness a gorilla's self-sacrifice for a wounded mate, to watch an elephant herd's communal effort on behalf of a stranded calf--to catch animals in certain acts is to wonder what moves them. Might there he a code of ethics in the animal kingdom? Must an animal be human to he humane? In this provocative book, a renowned scientist takes on those who have declared ethics uniquely human Making a compelling case for a morality grounded in biology, he shows how ethical behavior is as much a matter of evolution as any other trait, in humans and animals alike. World famous for his brilliant descriptions of Machiavellian power plays among chimpanzees-the nastier side of animal life--Frans de Waal here contends that animals have a nice side as well. Making his case through vivid anecdotes drawn from his work with apes and monkeys and holstered by the intriguing, voluminous data from his and others' ongoing research, de Waal shows us that many of the building blocks of morality are natural: they can he observed in other animals. Through his eyes, we see how not just primates but all kinds of animals, from marine mammals to dogs, respond to social rules, help each other, share food, resolve conflict to mutual satisfaction, even develop a crude sense of justice and fairness. Natural selection may be harsh, but it has produced highly successful species that survive through cooperation and mutual assistance. De Waal identifies this paradox as the key to an evolutionary account of morality, and demonstrates that human morality could never have developed without the foundation of fellow feeling our species shares with other animals. As his work makes clear, a morality grounded in biology leads to an entirely different conception of what it means to he human--and humane.


Animal Minds and Human Morals

Animal Minds and Human Morals

Author: Richard Sorabji

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780801482984

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Sorabji surveys a vast range of Greek philosophical texts and considers how classical discussions of animals' capacities intersect with central questions, not only in ethics but in the definition of human rationality as well.


The Animal Part

The Animal Part

Author: Mark Payne

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-10-15

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 0226650855

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How can literary imagination help us engage with the lives of other animals? The question represents one of the liveliest areas of inquiry in the humanities, and Mark Payne seeks to answer it by exploring the relationship between human beings and other animals in writings from antiquity to the present. Ranging from ancient Greek poets to modernists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Payne considers how writers have used verse to communicate the experience of animal suffering, created analogies between human and animal societies, and imagined the kind of knowledge that would be possible if human beings could see themselves as animals see them. The Animal Part also makes substantial contributions to the emerging discourse of the posthumanities. Payne offers detailed accounts of the tenuousness of the idea of the human in ancient literature and philosophy and then goes on to argue that close reading must remain a central practice of literary study if posthumanism is to articulate its own prehistory. For it is only through fine-grained literary interpretation that we can recover the poetic thinking about animals that has always existed alongside philosophical constructions of the human. In sum, The Animal Part marks a breakthrough in animal studies and offers a significant contribution to comparative poetics.


Animals in the Sociologies of Westermarck and Durkheim

Animals in the Sociologies of Westermarck and Durkheim

Author: Salla Tuomivaara

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-09-04

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 3030268632

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This book explores why animals, at some point, disappeared from the realm and scope of sociology. The role of sociology in the construction of a science of the ‘human’ has been substantial, building representations of the human sphere of life as unique. Within the sociological tradition however, animals have often been invisible, even non-existent. Through in-depth comparisons of the texts of prominent early sociologists Emile Durkheim and Edward Westermarck, Tuomivaara shows that despite this exclusion, representations of animals and human-animal relations were far more varied in early works than in the later sociological cannon. Addressing a significant gap in the interdisciplinary field of animal studies, Tuomivaara presents a close reading of the historical treatment of animals in the works of Durkheim and Westermarck to determine how the human-animal boundary was established in sociological theory. The diverse forms in which animals and ‘the animal’ appear in the works of early classical sociology are charted and explored, alongside the sociological themes that bring animals into these texts. Situated in contemporary theory, from critical animal studies to posthumanism, this important book lays the groundwork for a disciplinary shift away from this sharp human-animal dualism.


The Talking Greeks

The Talking Greeks

Author: John Heath

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-05-12

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 1139443917

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When considering the question of what makes us human, the ancient Greeks provided numerous suggestions. This book argues that the defining criterion in the Hellenic world, however, was the most obvious one: speech. It explores how it was the capacity for authoritative speech which was held to separate humans from other animals, gods from humans, men from women, Greeks from non-Greeks, citizens from slaves, and the mundane from the heroic. John Heath illustrates how Homer's epics trace the development of immature young men into adults managing speech in entirely human ways and how in Aeschylus' Oresteia only human speech can disentangle man, beast, and god. Plato's Dialogues are shown to reveal the consequences of Socratically imposed silence. With its examination of the Greek focus on speech, animalization, and status, this book offers new readings of key texts and provides significant insights into the Greek approach to understanding our world.