Download or read book Embodiment How Animals and Humans Make Sense of Things The Dawn of Art Ethics Science Politics and Religion written by Jesse James Thomas and published by Dog Ear Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is not about what we can teach animals, but what they can teach us. Their differences are often not as radical as most humans imagine, which is one reason we love animals. We have more neurons in our neurological systems, but we share many of the same features and underestimate what they have learned about survival strategies over the eons. We stop and think a lot more, but in doing so can sometimes interfere with natural processes and the results are not always good. Animals provide a good platform from which we should launch emotionally and even ethically if we pay attention to them. This book is unlike carefully documented scholarly articles that Dr. Thomas also writes. It is written for a wide popular audience, and is loaded with stories and humor. It is meant to be easy to read for almost anyone.
Download or read book Intersections of Religion and Astronomy written by Chris Corbally and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the way in which cultural ideas about "the heavens" shape religious ideas and are shaped by them in return. Our approaches to cosmology have a profound effect on the way in which we each deal with religious questions and participate in the imaginative work of public and private world-building. Employing an interdisciplinary team of international scholars, each chapter shows how religion and cosmology interrelate and matter for real people. Historical and contemporary case studies are included to demonstrate the lived reality of a variety of faith traditions and their interactions with the cosmos. This breadth of scope allows readers to get a unique overview of how religion, science and our view of space have, and will continue to, impact our worldviews. Offering a comprehensive exploration of humanity and its relationship with cosmology, this book will be an important reference for scholars of Religion and Science, Religion and Culture, Interreligious Dialogue and Theology, as well as those interested in Science and Culture and Public Education.
Download or read book Religion Matters Volume 2 written by P. T. Babie and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Art Ethics and the Human Animal Relationship written by Linda Johnson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the works of major artists between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as important barometers of individual and collective values toward non-human life. Once viewed as merely representational, these works can also be read as tangential or morally instrumental by way of formal analysis and critical theories. Chapter Two demonstrates the discrimination toward large and small felines in Genesis and The Book of Revelation. Chapter Three explores the cruel capture of free roaming animals and how artists depicted their furs, feathers and shells in costume as symbols of virtue and vice. Chapter Four identifies speciest beliefs between donkeys and horses. Chapter Five explores the altered Dutch kitchen spaces and disguised food animals in various culinary constructs in still life painting. Chapter Six explores the animal substances embedded in pigments. Chapter Seven examines animals in absentia-in the crafting of brushes. The book concludes with the fish paintings of William Merritt Chase whose glazing techniques demonstrate an artistic approach that honors fishes as sentient beings.
Download or read book Strange Tools written by Alva Noë and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosopher makes the case for thinking of works of art as tools for investigating ourselves In his new book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, Noë offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.
Download or read book The Human Animal Boundary written by Mario Wenning and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Human–Animal Boundary shifts the traditional anthropocentric focus of philosophy and literature by combining the question “what is human?” with the question “what is animal?” The objective is to expand the imaginative scope of human–animal relationships by combining perspectives from different disciplines, traditions, and cultural backgrounds.
Download or read book Good Natured written by Frans B. M. de Waal and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997-10-15 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To observe a dog's guilty look. to witness a gorilla's self-sacrifice for a wounded mate, to watch an elephant herd's communal effort on behalf of a stranded calf--to catch animals in certain acts is to wonder what moves them. Might there he a code of ethics in the animal kingdom? Must an animal be human to he humane? In this provocative book, a renowned scientist takes on those who have declared ethics uniquely human Making a compelling case for a morality grounded in biology, he shows how ethical behavior is as much a matter of evolution as any other trait, in humans and animals alike. World famous for his brilliant descriptions of Machiavellian power plays among chimpanzees-the nastier side of animal life--Frans de Waal here contends that animals have a nice side as well. Making his case through vivid anecdotes drawn from his work with apes and monkeys and holstered by the intriguing, voluminous data from his and others' ongoing research, de Waal shows us that many of the building blocks of morality are natural: they can he observed in other animals. Through his eyes, we see how not just primates but all kinds of animals, from marine mammals to dogs, respond to social rules, help each other, share food, resolve conflict to mutual satisfaction, even develop a crude sense of justice and fairness. Natural selection may be harsh, but it has produced highly successful species that survive through cooperation and mutual assistance. De Waal identifies this paradox as the key to an evolutionary account of morality, and demonstrates that human morality could never have developed without the foundation of fellow feeling our species shares with other animals. As his work makes clear, a morality grounded in biology leads to an entirely different conception of what it means to he human--and humane.
Download or read book Other Creations written by Christopher Manes and published by Doubleday Books. This book was released on 1997 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Saint Bernard, despite its name, is unwelcome in church. Any dog, cat, sheep, terrapin, or bird clearly faces this same prohibition. Do animals have any relevance to humanity's continuing search for a spiritually rich life? Have they ever? Modern religions have all but banished the animal kingdom from our places of worship, and the non-human world has become increasingly marginalized and left out of religious discourse. And yet, just beneath the surface lies a lush tradition of animal archetypes, a spiritual bestiary in which Satan appears as a serpent, Jesus as the Lamb of God, and the Holy Spirit as a dove. Jehovah tests the depths of Daniel's belief in a lion's den. Our cathedrals teem with stone eagles, stags, and other symbolic fauna. Our deepest moral ideas find expression through animal stories like Aesop's fables, the Buddhist Jataka, and Orwell's Animal Farm. At the prehistoric heart of humanity's attempts to articulate spiritual sentiments, we find the caves of Lascaux and images, not of white-robed deities, but of the giant beasts of the Ice Age. Christopher Manes's groundbreaking Other Creations uncovers this tradition as it flourished in the past and as it lives on today. In this fascinating study, unlike any yet published, Manes shows how animals embodied our first attempts to express spirituality - as seen in the cave paintings of Ice Age Europeand how they continue to do so today in subtle, even unperceived ways, such as through sports team mascots, horror films, and toys. Drawing on both his literary scholarship and his personal search for a deeper experience of faith, Manes demonstrates that animals do not simply decorate our religious lives; they are part of the very texture of human spirituality.
Download or read book The Animal Inside written by Geoffrey Dierckxsens and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-12-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A team of renowned philosophers and a new generation of thinkers come together to offer the first book-length examination of the relationship between philosophical anthropology and animal studies.
Download or read book Spirit Unleashed written by Anne Benvenuti and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2014-06-09 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Spirit Unleashed, Anne Benvenuti uses analysis of real encounters with wild animals to take us on an intellectual tour of our thinking about animals by way of biological sciences, scientific psychology, philosophy, and theology to show that we have been wrong in our understanding of ourselves amongst other animals. The good news is that we can correct our course and make ourselves happier in the process. Drawing us into encounters with a desert rattlesnake, an offended bonobo, an injured fawn, a curious whale, a determined woodpecker, and others, she gives us a glimpse of their souls. Benvenuti strongly makes the case that to change the way we think about animals--and our way of relating to them--holds the possibility of changing all life on Earth for the better.
Download or read book The Master and His Emissary written by Iain McGilchrist and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new edition of the bestselling classic – published with a special introduction to mark its 10th anniversary This pioneering account sets out to understand the structure of the human brain – the place where mind meets matter. Until recently, the left hemisphere of our brain has been seen as the ‘rational’ side, the superior partner to the right. But is this distinction true? Drawing on a vast body of experimental research, Iain McGilchrist argues while our left brain makes for a wonderful servant, it is a very poor master. As he shows, it is the right side which is the more reliable and insightful. Without it, our world would be mechanistic – stripped of depth, colour and value.
Download or read book Perceiving Animals written by NA NA and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we look at the human understanding of beasts in the past what we see are not only the foundations of our own perception of animals but humans contemplating their own status. Perceiving Animals argues that what is revealed in a wide range of writing from the early modern period is a recurring attempt to separate the human from the beast. Looking at the representation of the animal in law, religious writings, literary representation, science and political ideas, what emerges is a sense of the fragility of humanity, a sense of a species which always requires an external addition - property, civilisation, education, mastery of the natural world - to be fully human. Erica Fudge engages with both canonical and non-canonical texts from the period 1558-1649, and examines previously unchallenged aspects of the status of humanity: what does it mean to own an animal? How does civilisation take place, and what does this tell us about uncivilised man? What does the humanist emphasis on education mean for the uneducated? Does science ever offer humanity separation from the beast? Texts by writers including Edward Coke, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon and Richard Overton are re-examined, and the status of humanity comes under question. Perceiving Animals argues that within early modern English culture there is an uncomfortable sense of humanity with a superiority which is not innate, but dangerously unnatural.
Download or read book Thinking with Animals written by Lorraine Daston and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-02 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is anthropomorphism a scientific sin? Scientists and animal researchers routinely warn against "animal stories," and contrast rigorous explanations and observation to facile and even fanciful projections about animals. Yet many of us, scientists and researchers included, continue to see animals as humans and humans as animals. As this innovative new collection demonstrates, humans use animals to transcend the confines of self and species; they also enlist them to symbolize, dramatize, and illuminate aspects of humans' experience and fantasy. Humans merge with animals in stories, films, philosophical speculations, and scientific treatises. In their performance with humans on many stages and in different ways, animals move us to think. From Victorian vivisectionists to elephant conservation, from ancient Indian mythology to pet ownership in the contemporary United States, our understanding of both animals and what it means to be human has been shaped by anthropomorphic thinking. The contributors to Thinking with Animals explore the how and why of anthropomorphism, drawing attention to its rich and varied uses. Prominent scholars in the fields of anthropology, ethology, history, and philosophy, as well as filmmakers and photographers, take a closer look at how deeply and broadly ways of imagining animals have transformed humans and animals alike. Essays in the book investigate the changing patterns of anthropomorphism across different time periods and settings, as well as their transformative effects, both figuratively and literally, upon animals, humans, and their interactions. Examining how anthropomorphic thinking "works" in a range of different contexts, contributors reveal the ways in which anthropomorphism turns out to be remarkably useful: it can promote good health and spirits, enlist support in political causes, sell products across boundaries of culture of and nationality, crystallize and strengthen social values, and hold up a philosophical mirror to the human predicament.
Download or read book What Animals Teach Us about Politics written by Brian Massumi and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-03 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In What Animals Teach Us about Politics, Brian Massumi takes up the question of "the animal." By treating the human as animal, he develops a concept of an animal politics. His is not a human politics of the animal, but an integrally animal politics, freed from connotations of the "primitive" state of nature and the accompanying presuppositions about instinct permeating modern thought. Massumi integrates notions marginalized by the dominant currents in evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and philosophy—notions such as play, sympathy, and creativity—into the concept of nature. As he does so, his inquiry necessarily expands, encompassing not only animal behavior but also animal thought and its distance from, or proximity to, those capacities over which human animals claim a monopoly: language and reflexive consciousness. For Massumi, humans and animals exist on a continuum. Understanding that continuum, while accounting for difference, requires a new logic of "mutual inclusion." Massumi finds the conceptual resources for this logic in the work of thinkers including Gregory Bateson, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Raymond Ruyer. This concise book intervenes in Deleuze studies, posthumanism, and animal studies, as well as areas of study as wide-ranging as affect theory, aesthetics, embodied cognition, political theory, process philosophy, the theory of play, and the thought of Alfred North Whitehead.
Download or read book Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents written by Gary Steiner and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2005-11-06 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Passion of the Western Mind written by Richard Tarnas and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-10-19 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the 'Westt's mainstream high culture' and the 'radically changing world' of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike....Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.
Download or read book Experiencing Animal Minds written by Julie A. Smith and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these multidisciplinary essays, academic scholars and animal experts explore the nature of animal minds and the methods humans conventionally and unconventionally use to understand them. The collection features chapters by scholars working in psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, literary studies, and art, as well as chapters by and about people who live and work with animals, including the founder of a sanctuary for chickens, a fur trapper, a popular canine psychologist, a horse trainer, and an art photographer who captures everyday contact between humans and their animal companions. Divided into five sections, the collection first considers the ways that humans live with animals and the influence of cohabitation on their perceptions of animals' minds. It follows with an examination of anthropomorphism as both a guide and hindrance to mapping animal consciousness. Chapters next examine the effects of embodiment on animals' minds and the role of animal-human interembodiment on humans' understandings of animals' minds. Final sections identify historical representations of difference between human and animal consciousness and their relevance to pre-established cultural attitudes, as well as the ways that representations of animals' minds target particular audiences and sometimes produce problematic outcomes. The editors conclude with a discussion of the relationship between the book's chapters and two pressing themes: the connection between human beliefs about animals' minds and human ethical behavior, and the challenges and conditions for knowing the minds of animals. By inviting readers to compare and contrast multiple, uncommon points of view, this collection offers a unique encounter with the diverse perspectives and theories now shaping animal studies.
