Animals

Peter Adamson is Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the LMU in Munich. He is the editor of another forthcoming volume in the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series, Health: the History of a Concept, and the author of the book series A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, published by Oxford University Press.G. Fay Edwards completed her doctorate in Ancient Philosophy at King's College London in 2013, and took up a position as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis until late 2015. She has published papers on Plato, Porphyry and the Stoics, and is the author of 'How to Escape Indictment for Impiety: Teaching as Punishment in the Euthyphro,' which was published in the Journal of the History of Philosophy.

Each of the twelve chapters of this collection presents a nuanced reading of a historical period or thinker and shows their attitudes towards non-human animals to be well-developed, explicitly argued and informed by up-to-date empirical knowledge...Overall, Animals: A History represents a genuine contribution to debates about animal cognition and animal ethics. This contribution comes not through the introduction of new figures or arguments, but rather through grounding existing figures and arguments in an impressive level of philosophical detail and historical depth. Those who read this book will no longer be satisfied with the lazy caricatures of Aristotle, Descartes, Kant and others which haunt our discourse about animals, but will see them as the worthy interlocutors and historically grounded thinkers that they are.

• ContributorsIntroduction, Peter Adamson Chapter 1. Aristotle on Animals Devin HenryChapter 2. Reincarnation, Rationality, and Temperance: Platonists on Not Eating Animals G. Fay EdwardsReflection: Listening to Aesop's Animals Jeremy B. LefkowitzChapter 3. Illuminating Thought: Animals in Classical Indian Thought Amber D. CarpenterReflection: The Joy of Fish and Chinese Animal Painting Hou-mei SungChapter 4. Human and Animal Nature in the Philosophy of the Islamic World Peter AdamsonReflection: Of Rainbow Snakes and Baffling Buffalos: Reflections on a Central African Mask Allen F. RobertsChapter 5.Marking the Boundaries: Animals in Medieval Latin Philosophy Juhana ToivanenReflection: Animal Intelligence: Examples of the Human-Animal Border in Medieval Literature Sabine ObermaierReflection: Subversive Laughter in Reynard the Fox James Simpson Chapter 6. Animals in the Renaissance: You Eat What you Are Cecilia MuratoriChapter 7. Animal Souls and Beast Machines: Descartes' Mechanical Biology Deborah J. BrownChapter 8. Kant on Animals Patrick KainReflection: The Gaze of the Ape: Gabriel von Max's Affenmalerei and the "Question of All Questions" Cecilia MuratoriChapter 9. The Emergence of the Drive Concept and the Collapse of the Animal/Human Divide Paul KatsafanasChapter 10. Governing Darwin's World Philip KitcherChapter 11. Morgan's Canon: Animal Psychology in the Twentieth Century and Beyond Helen StewardChapter 12.The Contemporary Debate in Animal Ethics Robert Garner Primary Literature Secondary Literature Index