Description

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.

About the Author

Gary Steiner is John Howard Harris Professor of Philosophy at Bucknell University. He is the author of Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship, and Descartes as a Moral Thinker: Christianity, Technology, Nihilism. He is also the translator of Prauss’s Knowing and Doing in Heidegger’s “Being and Time” and Löwith’s Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism.

Praise For…

“Steiner’s work is a rigorous and stimulating reappraisal of the long-lasting and often baleful influence of Greek philosophy on Western attitudes towards animals.”
--New England Classical Journal

“Steiner has provided a needed and lucid account of the history he targets.”
—Journal of the History of Philosophy

“This book will be highly valuable to scholars of animal rights/welfare as a historical overview of this issue, and an excellent introduction to the history of Western philosophy in general. Highly recommended.”
—Choice