Just a plaything for your pet cat?

Animals are not merely passive 'others' in our world, argues Erica Fudge. In fact, by their very 'otherness' they help us define ourselves - as well as drive our technology. When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?" When Michel de Montaigne asked himself this question in the late 16th century he was continuing a philosophical tradition that took animals as the limit point of human understanding. Going back to the second century AD, and the work of Sextus Empiricus, and continuing through Montaigne to the present in Jacques Derrida's recent work, animals have put into question humanity's assertion of its all-powerful knowingness

At the heart of the home : An animal reading of mikhail bulgakov's the heart of a dog

When we try and contemplate who it is that we think we are in the world history has an important role to play. It can alert us to what we have lost; can point up how we have come to think what we think; and can remind us that what we think now will, inevitably, change — will be succeeded by other models, also temporary, also trying to make meaning out of who it is that we think we are. In these terms, the history of the human is not simply a history of progress from a “bad” model of who we are (Aristotle’s sense of the human as special and separate from all animals; Aquinas’s sense of the human as the only center of the moral universe, for example) to a “good” one in which our relationship with and location in the natural world is more fully acknowledged. Rather, we should perhaps also view the place of our species as a shifting one in which processes of what could be termed humanning, unhumanning, and rehumanning are constantly taking place

Introduction to special issues : Reading animals

This article is an introduction to a special issue of Worldviews. It discusses reading animals

How a man differs from a dog

In early modern history, numerous vices were represented as having the ability to transform humans into beasts. These representations would appear to play into a theological and moral conceptualization of the world rather than a “zoological” one. An analysis of early modern constructions of perception and the role of the passions reveals a logic in which humans can actually become animals through their actions. The writer discusses the work of Oxford clergyman and author Robert Burton, whose early exploration of self, The Anatomy of Melancholy, drew heavily on the belief that human failings constituted a kind of base animal immorality

A left-handed blow : writing the history of animals

This chapter looks at writing the history of animal

Pocohontas's baptism : Reformed theology and the paradox of desire

Seeking to elucidate certain elements of Reformed theology, the writer explores the conversion narrative concerning the baptism, in the early 17th century, of the Native American woman Pocahontas. She explains that in a letter detailing his anxieties about his relationship with Pocahontas, the English settler John Rolfe denies the desire of carnal affection while celebrating his longing to convert Pocahontas. She highlights this link between the desire for the flesh and the desire for the spirit, and she traces the ways in which these longings operate in Rolfe's letter and in the baptismal theology informing the conversion of Pocahontas. She suggests that an analysis of the desires of the convertor and of the connection between the feared yearning for the flesh and the sacred desire for the divine reveal important aspects of Reformed thought

Animal lives

The writer discusses the possibility of writing an animal's biography. It may be too simple to assume that anthropocentrism—a belief in the centrality and superiority of human beings—is the reason why the concept of biography has always been applied uniquely to humans. To write a “life” may not just be to present a series of “facts” but to bear testimony to that individual's capacity to communicate through language the subject's own self-understanding. Using this rationale, the subject of biography is always potentially the subject of autobiography. The exclusion of animals from the Dictionary of National Biography does not just demonstrate the ongoing anthropocentrism of history as a discipline, but it also demonstrates the continuation of a version of human selfhood that is, and always has been, created out of, in exclusion from, and by the naming of animals

Introduction : Viewing animals

The introduction to this special issue of Worldviews goes back to the first European encounters with the New World as a way of opening up a discussion about the nature of viewing animals. I argue that, just as the Europeans transformed this New World into a recognisable one in the sixteenth century, so too do we constantly transform the natural world that we view. The process of comprehension is offered as classification followed by observation, then representation, and all of these elements of our engagements with animals take place, I argue, in particular contexts: historical, geographical, cultural, intellectual. The critic "reading" animals, and reading human observations of animals must take these factors into consideration when thinking about the act of engagement

Making Claims for Migrant Workers: Human Rights and Citizenship

Migrant workers claims for greater protection in a globalized world are typically expressed either in the idiom of international human rights or citizenship. Instead of contrasting these two normative frames, the paper explores the extent to which human rights and citizenship discourses intersect when it comes to claims by migrant workers. An analysis of the international human and labour rights instruments that are specifically designed for migrant workers reveals how neither discourse questions the assumption of territorial state sovereignty. Drawing upon sociological and political approaches to human rights claims, I evaluate the Arendtian-inspired critique of international human rights, which is that they ignore the very basis ‘right to have rights’. In doing so, I discuss the different dimensions of citizenship and conclude that international rights can be used by migrant workers to assert right claims that reinforce a conception of citizenship that, although different from national citizenship, has the potential to address their distinctive social location

Introduction - veterinary science

This introduction - co-written with Clare Palmer - sets up the following selection of open access essays in the 'living book': Veterinary Science: Animals, Humans and Health online at: http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Veterinary_scienc