Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents

The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy

Gary Steiner

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822970989
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Contemporary Debates on the Status of Animals
• 2. Epic and Pre-Socratic Thought
• 3. Aristotle and the Stoics: The Evolution of a Cosmic Principle
• 4. Classical Defenses of Animals: Plutarch and Porphyry
• 5. The Status of Animals in Medieval Christianiy
• 6. Descartes on the Moral Status of Animals
• 7. The Empiricists, the Utilitarians, and Kant
• 8. Conceptions of Continuiy: Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Schweitzer
• 9. Postmodern Conceptions of the Human-Animal Boundary
• 10. Rethinking the Moral Status of Animals
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index