The Philosophical Ethology of Roberto Marchesini
The Philosophical Ethology of Roberto Marchesini

Author: Jeffrey Bussolini

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-19

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13: 1351628895

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Roberto Marchesini is an Italian philosopher and ethologist whose work is significant for the rethinking of animality and human–animal relations. Throughout such important books as Il dio Pan (1988), Il concetto di soglia (1996), Post-human (2002), Intelligenze plurime (2008), Epifania animale (2014), and Etologia filosofica (2016), he offers a scathing critique of reductive, mechanistic models of animal behaviour, as well as a positive contribution to zooanthropological and phenomenological methods for understanding animal life. Centred on the dynamic and performative field of interactions and relations in the world, his critical and speculative approach to the cognitive life sciences offers a vision of animals as acting subjects and bearers of culture, whose action and agency is also indispensable to human culture. In tracing the ways in which we share our lives and histories with animals in different contexts of interaction, Marchesini’s cutting-edge philosophical ethology also contributes to an overarching philosophical anthropology of the human as the animal that most requires the present and input of other animals. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

Critical Ethology and Post-Anthropocentric Ethics
Critical Ethology and Post-Anthropocentric Ethics

Author: Roberto Marchesini

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-05-22

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 3030742032

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The primary purpose of this book is to contribute to an overcoming of the traditional separation between humanties and life sciences which, according to the authors, is required today both by the developments of these disciplines and by the social problems they have to face. The volume discusses the theoretical, epistemological and ethical repercussions of the main acquisitions obtained in the last decades from the behavioral sciences. Both the authors are inspired by the concept of a “critical ethology”, oriented to archive the nature/culture and human/animal dichotomies. The book proposes a theoretical and methodological restructuring of the comparative study of the animal behavior, learning, and cultures, focused on the fact that thought, culture and language are not exclusively human prerogatives. The proposed analysis includes a critique of speciesism and determinism in the ethical field, and converge with the Numanities, to which the series is dedicated, on a key point: it is necessary to arrive at an education system able to offer scientific, social and ethical skills that are trasversal and transcendent to the traditional humanities/life sciences bipartition. Skills that are indispensable for facing the complex challenges of the contemporary society and promoting a critical reflection of humanity on itself.

(Un)Learning to Be Human?
(Un)Learning to Be Human?

Author: Stefan Herbrechter

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2024-09-23

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 900470826X

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Critical posthumanism is a theory paradigm that has become hugely influential across the humanities and social sciences in the last twenty years. This volume collects essays written over the last decade by one of the founders and leading figures of this movement. Originally a reaction to accelerated technological and media change that challenges traditional notions of what it means to be human, posthumanism (as opposed to transhumanism) has developed into a general critique and reappraisal of life after humanism and anthropocentrism. The essays collected here are dealing with aspects of education, technology, politics, media and art, and share a focus on how to critique and unlearn traditional understandings of humanness and (re)learn what it means to be human differently.

The Philosophical Ethology of Vinciane Despret
The Philosophical Ethology of Vinciane Despret

Author: Brett Buchanan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-19

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1351657127

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Vinciane Despret is a Belgian philosopher whose work proposes new questions and approaches to human-animal relations. Of central importance to her thought is an intellectual and cultural proposal to allow animals to show their agency and allow them to be interesting. With genuine curiosity, Despret looks at how humans and animals transform one another through daily encounters, and she explores these metamorphoses through an engagement with the history of philosophy, literature, science, field research, and art. In a playful though serious tone, Despret claims that animals are always more interesting than we give them credit for, and that the achievements of animals are never far from our own. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy
Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy

Author: Felice Cimatti

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-09-03

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 3030475077

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This volume provides an overview of contemporary Italian philosophy from the perspective of animality. Its rationale rests on two main premises: the great topicality of both Italian contemporary philosophy (the so-called “Italian Theory”) and of the animal question (the so-called “animal turn” in the humanities and the social sciences) in the contemporary philosophical panorama. The volume not only intersects these two axes, illuminating Italian Theory through the animal question, but also proposes an original thesis: that the animal question is a central and founding issue of contemporary Italian philosophy. It combines historical-descriptive chapters with analyses of the theme in several philosophical branches, such as biopolitics, Posthumanism, Marxism, Feminism, Antispeciesism and Theology, and with original contributions by renowned authors of contemporary Italian (animal) philosophy. The volume is both historical-descriptive and speculative and is intended for a broad academic audience, embracing both Italian studies and Animal studies at all levels.

The Creative Animal
The Creative Animal

Author: Roberto Marchesini

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-08-03

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 3031074149

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This book deals with the theme of creativity in the animal world, conceived as a basic function for adapting to specific situations and as a source of innovations and inventions. Creativity is a fundamental resource for the individual who always has a leading role in conduct. To explain creativity, the book focuses on the concept of animal subjectivity, providing a new explanatory model of behavior capable of overcoming the image of the animal moved by automatisms. This model does not use consciousness as a necessary condition, but is based: 1) on affective components, such as behavioral motives, and 2) cognitive, as tools used by the subject to carry out his purposes. Particular attention is paid to the learning processes showing the subjective character of the experience. One topic addressed is the role of creativity in the evolution of living beings: how an invention, by modifying the niche characteristics, is able to change the selective pressures and the trajectory of phylogeny. Roberto Marchesini explains that creativity is a factor that is anything but rare or exceptional in the animal world—it constitutes a fundamental quality for many aspects of animal life.

The Philosophical Ethology of Dominique Lestel
The Philosophical Ethology of Dominique Lestel

Author: Matthew Chrulew

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-18

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1351657151

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Dominique Lestel is a French philosopher whose work is significant for the rethinking of animality and human-animal relations. Throughout such important books as L’Animalité (1996), Les Origines animales de la culture (2001) and L’Animal singulier (2004), he offers a fierce critique of reductive, mechanistic models of animal behaviour, as well as a positive contribution to etho-ethnographic and phenomenological methods for understanding animal life. Centred around hybrid human–animal communities of shared interests, affects and meaning, his critical and speculative approach to the animal sciences offers a vision of animals as acting subjects and bearers of culture, who form their own worlds and transform them in concert with human and other partners. In tracing the ways in which we share our lives with animals in the texture of animality, Lestel’s cutting-edge philosophical ethology also contributes to an overarching philosophical anthropology of the human as the most animal of animals. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

Flashpoint Epistemology Volume 1
Flashpoint Epistemology Volume 1

Author: Bernadette Baker

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-19

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1003827942

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The 21st century is steeped in claims to interconnection, technological innovation, and new affective intensities amid challenges to the primacy and centrality of "the human". Flashpoint epistemology attends to the lived difficulties that arise in teaching, policymaking, curriculum, and research among continuous practices of differentiation, and for which there is no pre-existing template for judgment, resolution, or action. Flashpoint Epistemology Volume 1 examines contemporary collisions and reworkings of cultural-political issues in education through arts and humanities-based approaches. How and whether lines are (re)drawn in educational practice – and via who-what – between justice, morality, religion, ethics, subjectivities, intersectionality, the sublime, and the senses are a particular focus. The volume offers innovative relational approaches and new narrativization strategies, examining the aporia experienced when operating in educational domains of inevitable, recurring, difficult, fortuitous, and/or unforeseen flashpoints. The chapters will engage researchers seeking new approaches to education’s complexities, nested discourses, and ever-moving horizons of enactment. It will also benefit post/graduate students and teachers whose work intersects with sociological, philosophical, and cultural studies and who are curious about claims to interconnection, the ethical quandaries embedded in practice, and the affordances and limits of technological innovation.

Over the Human
Over the Human

Author: Roberto Marchesini

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-07-26

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 3319625810

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This book presents a new way to understand human–animal interactions. Offering a profound discussion of topics such as human identity, our relationship with animals and the environment, and our culture, the author channels the vibrant Italian traditions of humanism, materialism, and speculative philosophy. The research presents a dialogue between the humanities and the natural sciences. It challenges the separation and oppression of animals with a post-humanism steeped in the traditions of the Italian Renaissance. Readers discover a vision of the human as a species informed by an intertwining with animals. The human being is not constructed by an onto-poetic process, but rather by close relations with otherness. The human system is increasingly unstable and, therefore, more hybrid. The argument it presents interests scholars, thinkers, and researchers. It also appeals to anyone who wants to delve into the deep animal–human bond and its philosophical, cultural, political instances. The author is a veterinarian, ethologist, and philosopher. He uses cognitive science, zooanthropology, and philosophy to engage in a series of empirical, theoretical, and practice-based engagements with animal life. In the process, he argues that animals are key to human identity and culture at all levels.

The Virus Paradigm
The Virus Paradigm

Author: Roberto Marchesini

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-02-18

Total Pages: 127

ISBN-13: 1108967264

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In recent years, the word 'virus' has lost its biological perimeter of reference to acquire a much broader – could say 'paradigmatic' – meaning. The term 'virus' can be seen as a key word or an explanatory model also for processes that go beyond the infectious sphere. Every event appears to have a viral character: from the way information is transmitted to the processes of cultural globalization, from the impact of human beings on the planet to the subversion of ecosystems, from pandemic risks to the demographic increase on the planet. This seems to be indeed the Age of the Virus. Its model can be applied to most of the phenomena that characterize the twenty-first. Its profile – its looming and invisible nature, its ability to use other people's resources to spread and to transform into a dangerous doppelganger – is perfect to represent the fears of the contemporary age.