The Greek philosopher Protagoras, in the opening words of his lost book Truth, famously asserted, "Man is the measure of all things." This contention--that humanity cannot know the world except by means of human aptitudes and abilities--has endured through the centuries in the work of diverse writers. In this bold and creative new investigation into the philosophical and intellectual parameters of the question of the animal, Tom Tyler explores a curious fact: in arguing or assuming that knowledge is characteristically human, thinkers have time and again employed animals as examples,...

HumAnimal explores the experience of dehumanization as the privation of speech. Taking up the figure of silence as the space between human and animal, it traces the potential for an alternate political and ethical way of life beyond law. Employing the resources offered by deconstruction as well as an ontological critique of biopower, Kalpana Rahita Seshadri suggests that humAnimal, as the site of impropriety opened by racism and manifested by silence, can be political and hazardous to power.

Through the lens of such works as Coetzee's Foe, Chesnutt's "The Dumb Witness," Dr....

Humanity has sat at the center of philosophical thinking for too long. The recent advent of environmental philosophy and posthuman studies has widened our scope of inquiry to include ecosystems, animals, and artificial intelligence. Yet the vast majority of the stuff in our universe, and even in our lives, remains beyond serious philosophical concern.

In Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing, Ian Bogost develops an object-oriented ontology that puts things at the center of being--a philosophy in which nothing exists any more or less than anything else, in which...

A central thinker on the question of the animal in continental thought, Elisabeth de Fontenay moves in this volume from Jacques Derrida's uneasily intimate writing on animals to a passionate frontal engagement with political and ethical theory as it has been applied to animals--along with a stinging critique of the work of Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri as well as with other "utilitarian" philosophers of animal-human relations.

Humans and animals are different from one another. To conflate them is to be intellectually sentimental. And yet, from our position of dominance, do we not...

How far apart are humans from animals--even the "vampire squid from hell"? Playing the scientist/philosopher/provocateur, Vilem Flusser uses this question as a springboard to dive into a literal and a philosophical ocean. "The abyss that separates us" from the vampire squid (or vampire octopus, perhaps, since Vampyroteuthis infernalis inhabits its own phylogenetic order somewhere between the two) "is incomparably smaller than that which separates us from extraterrestrial life, as imagined in science fiction and sought by astrobiologists," Flusser notes at the outset of the...

As exemplary representatives of a form of critical feminism, the writings of Judith Butler, Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway offer entry into the great crises of contemporary society, politics, and culture. Butler leads readers to rethink the boundaries of the human in a time of perpetual war. Hayles turns herself into a "writing machine" in order to find a dwelling place for the digital humanities within the austere landscape of the culture of the code. Haraway is the one contemporary thinker to have begun the necessary ethical project of creating a new language of potential...

Animals have always been compelling subjects for artists, but the rise of animal advocacy and posthumanist thought has prompted a reconsideration of the relationship between artist and animal. In this book, Steve Baker examines the work of contemporary artists who directly confront questions of animal life, treating animals not for their aesthetic qualities or as symbols of the human condition but rather as beings who actively share the world with humanity.

The concerns of the artists presented in this book--Sue Coe, Eduardo Kac, Lucy Kimbell, Catherine Chalmers, Olly and Suzi,...

Humanesis critically examines central strains of posthumanism, searching out biases in the ways that human-technology coupling is explained. Specifically, it interrogates three approaches taken by posthumanist discourse: scientific, humanist, and organismic. David Cecchetto's investigations reveal how each perspective continues to hold on to elements of the humanist tradition that it is ostensibly mobilized against. His study frontally desublimates the previously unseen presumptions that underlie each of the three thought lines and offers incisive appraisals of the work of three...

Having set global warming in irreversible motion, we are facing the possibility of ecological catastrophe. But the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of thought, confronting us with a problem that seems to defy not only our control but also our understanding. Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls "hyperobjects"--entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. In this book, Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact...

"More than fifteen years ago," Jacques Derrida writes in the prologue to this remarkable and uniquely revealing book, "a phrase came to me, as though in spite of me. . . . It imposed itself upon me with the authority, so discreet and simple it was, of a judgment: 'cinders there are' (il y a la cendre). . . . I had to explain myself to it, respond to it--or for it."

In Cinders Derrida ranges across his work from the previous twenty years and discerns a recurrent cluster of arguments and images, all involving in one way or another ashes and cinders. For Derrida,...