Philosophical ethology is a field of multidisciplinary research which gathers natural sciences, social science, human studies and is dedicated to the issue of animal subjectivity.[ clarification needed ] It is about an ontological concept needing a philosophical place rather than a descriptive issue. With precursors in the 19th century, it emerged in its current in the 2010s.
Philosophical ethology develops from the thought of continental philosophers, whose researches involve ethology, philosophy and anthropology. Those authors had taken up the challenges coming from biology, phenomenology, critical theory, the Animal Studies and post-human philosophy. These are all disciplines dealing, each in its own way, with non-human animals and the interactions among living beings, in order to propose a new paradigm able to go beyond the limits of the anthropocentrism, which underlay traditional theories.
The mean critics by those authors is the Cartesian heiress of automata: [1] whereas the classical ethology and behaviourism have described how the animal machine would work and which were the mechanisms regulating processes, nevertheless these authors did not challenge the mean idea, that is an animal is not a machine. Hence the need to elaborate a new multidisciplinary approach able to interpret the animal subjectivity ontologically speaking, and the different ontology correlated issues, such as the cultural dimensions, symbolism and materiality in non-human animals and their intra and interspecific relationship. [2]
Three recent issues of magazine Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities [3] have explored the thought of three scholars considered among the most influential voices in the field of philosophical ethology by the editors of the magazine, Brett Buchanan, Jeffrey Bussolini and Matthew Chrulew: the three authors are Vinciane Despret, Dominique Lestel and Roberto Marchesini.
Belgian philosopher and professor at the University of Liège, Vinciane Despret has written many essays and articles about the history of ethology, psychology and human-animal relationship. [4] [5] All along her career, Despert has worked together with few authors from different disciplines (ethology, arts, literature) and with many non-human animals (elephants, mice, rats, monkeys). [6] These encounters allowed her to build a unique research path.
In Despret’s writings, what is peculiar is the methodological approach and her anecdotal and idiosyncratic style: the author chooses to tell stories about animals (or, better, stories of relationship among animals, humans included) rather than to write about animals. Focal point to the authors is asking the right questions to non-human animals. [7] This means that animals are not texts to hermeneutically interpret, not object to quest via scientific experiments, but they are subjects able to provide their own answers to the questions interesting to them.
Within philosophical ethology, Despret has stressed the repetivity of any interspecific dialogue: non-human animals are being transformed by the encounter with the human beings, and, in the same way, human beings result transformed by the dialogue with the non-human. Despret’s stories are full of examples got by researchers, farmers, trainers – along with likewise important autobiographical reports – proving the enrichment coming from the encounter with the non-human animals.
A French philosopher and ethologist, Lestel is "Maître de conférences" at École Normale Supérieure of Paris and director of a research team about eco-anthropology and ethnology at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle. [8]
His credit is stressing how a cultural phenomenon is not a human peculiarity. [9] To Lestel, it necessary to see at anthropo-poiesis with an evolutionary and pluralist lens and at culture as a domain no longer apart from nature. It is necessary to become aware that we live in a multi-species society where each species produces their own kind of culture. This proximity of space and time among beings from different species allows the emergence of few sincere friendship and relationship, that have a historical, ethical and political importance, to Lestel. [10]
In 2016, during the International days of study GIS about human-animal held in Bologna, Lestel has rolled out his zoo-futurism, a philosophical artistic trend aiming to "re-animalise" the human being. [11]
An Italian philosopher, ethologist and zooanthopologist, Marchesini is director of School of Human-Animal interaction, of Study Centre of post-human philosophy and professor at few Italian universities. For over 20 years, he is leading a multidisciplinary project research about zooanthropology, posts-human philosophy and bioethics to demonstrate that non-human animals have a referent role during the identity structuring (anthropo-poiesis) [12] and the philosophical consequences coming from this kind of relationship.
Main concepts in Marchesini’s thought are zootropism and animal epiphany. With the term zootropism, Marchesini underlines the natural human tendency to turn to non-humans, like a kind of biophilia [13] rooted in our species that see in ethero-specifics some social counterparts able to contribute to anthropo-poiesis processes. [14]
On the other side, with the concept of "animal epiphany", Marchesini points out the characteristic of enunciation and revelation coming from humans-non humans relationship. Animal diversity let human being imagine new existential paths – in the flight of a bird, human being cannot see just the phenomenon per se, but perceive a new dimension of the thinking it is possible to fly [15] – and experiment an hybridational tension leading to identity slidings.
With the essay Philosophical ethology, [16] Marchesini focus on subjectivity. To him, subjectivity is foundation to conscience, not the opposite. Animals get constantly engaged from the external world through new occurrences asking for creativity and initiative not explicable with any automatism. [17] From this point of view, to Marchesini, desire connects animals and the world, desire make them acting in their present.
In philosophy, the term idealism identifies and describes metaphysical perspectives which assert that reality is indistinguishable and inseparable from perception and understanding; that reality is a mental construct closely connected to ideas. Idealist perspectives are in two categories: subjective idealism, which proposes that a material object exists only to the extent that a human being perceives the object; and objective idealism, which proposes the existence of an objective consciousness that exists prior to and independently of human consciousness, thus the existence of the object is independent of human perception.
Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds matter to be the fundamental substance in nature, and all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. According to philosophical materialism, mind and consciousness are by-products or epiphenomena of material processes, without which they cannot exist. This concept directly contrasts with idealism, where mind and consciousness are first-order realities to which matter is dependent while material interactions are secondary.
The mind is the set of faculties responsible for all mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves. These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for various mental phenomena, like perception, pain experience, belief, desire, intention, and emotion. Various overlapping classifications of mental phenomena have been proposed. Important distinctions group them according to whether they are sensory, propositional, intentional, conscious, or occurrent. Minds were traditionally understood as substances but it is more common in the contemporary perspective to conceive them as properties or capacities possessed by humans and higher animals. Various competing definitions of the exact nature of the mind or mentality have been proposed. Epistemic definitions focus on the privileged epistemic access the subject has to these states. Consciousness-based approaches give primacy to the conscious mind and allow unconscious mental phenomena as part of the mind only to the extent that they stand in the right relation to the conscious mind. According to intentionality-based approaches, the power to refer to objects and to represent the world is the mark of the mental. For behaviorism, whether an entity has a mind only depends on how it behaves in response to external stimuli while functionalism defines mental states in terms of the causal roles they play. Central questions for the study of mind, like whether other entities besides humans have minds or how the relation between body and mind is to be conceived, are strongly influenced by the choice of one's definition.
In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality.
Posthumanism or post-humanism is an idea in continental philosophy and critical theory responding to the presence of anthropocentrism in 21st-century thought. It encompasses a wide variety of branches, including:
Consciousness Explained is a 1991 book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett, in which the author offers an account of how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain. Dennett describes consciousness as an account of the various calculations occurring in the brain at close to the same time. He compares consciousness to an academic paper that is being developed or edited in the hands of multiple people at one time, the "multiple drafts" theory of consciousness. In this analogy, "the paper" exists even though there is no single, unified paper. When people report on their inner experiences, Dennett considers their reports to be more like theorizing than like describing. These reports may be informative, he says, but a psychologist is not to take them at face value. Dennett describes several phenomena that show that perception is more limited and less reliable than we perceive it to be.
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, sometimes published with the subtitle A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 book by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In the book, Sartre develops a philosophical account in support of his existentialism, dealing with topics such as consciousness, perception, social philosophy, self-deception, the existence of "nothingness", psychoanalysis, and the question of free will.
Jakob Johann Freiherr von Uexküll was a Baltic German biologist who worked in the fields of muscular physiology and animal behaviour studies and was an influence on the cybernetics of life. However, his most notable contribution is the notion of Umwelt, used by semiotician Thomas Sebeok and philosopher Martin Heidegger. His works established biosemiotics as a field of research.
Neopragmatism, sometimes called post-Deweyan pragmatism, linguistic pragmatism, or analytic pragmatism, is the philosophical tradition that infers that the meaning of words is a result of how they are used, rather than the objects they represent.
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addressed, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the nature of particular mental states. Aspects of the mind that are studied include mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, the nature of cognition and of thought, and the relationship of the mind to the body.
Antonio Millán-Puelles was a Spanish philosopher interested in phenomenology and metaphysics, who published many books and articles. He discovered his vocation to philosophy when he read Husserl’s Logical Investigations and abandoned the medical studies he had just begun.
Maurizio Ferraris is an Italian continental philosopher and scholar, whose name is associated especially with the philosophical current named "new realism"—Ferraris wrote the Manifesto of New Realism in 2012, which was published by SUNY Press in 2014) -- which shares significant similarities with speculative realism and object oriented ontology.
Juliana González Valenzuela is a Mexican philosopher.
José María Ferrater Mora was a Spanish philosopher, essayist and writer. He is considered the most prominent Catalan philosopher of the 20th-century and was the author of over 35 books, including a four-volume Diccionario de filosofía and Being and Death: An Outline of Integrationist Philosophy (1962). Subjects he worked on include ontology, history of philosophy, metaphysics, anthropology, the philosophy of history and culture, epistemology, logic, philosophy of science, and ethics. He also directed several films.
Vinciane Despret is a Belgian philosopher of science, associate professor, at the University of Liège, Belgium.
Lorenzo Chiesa is a philosopher, critical theorist, translator, and professor whose academic research and works focus on the intersection between ontology, psychoanalysis, and political theory.
Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel is an Australian social and political theorist who is presently an Associate Professor in Human Rights and Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Sydney. His work addresses critical animal studies, the rights of disabled people, and theoretical perspectives on violence.
David Olivier is a French and British philosopher and antispeciesist activist. He is founder of the French journal Cahiers antispécistes, the annual event Veggie Pride and of the annual meeting Les Estivales de la question animale . Olivier is also the creator of the term "veggiephobia" and of numerous articles and conferences. He is an advocate of utilitarian and antinatauralist ethics, and defines himself politically as a progressive.
Thomas Lepeltier is a French independent scholar, essayist and science writer specializing in the history and philosophy of science and applied ethics, known in particular for his contributions to the field of animal law. He is the author of several philosophical works on animal ethics such as L'imposture intellectuelle des carnivores and of science history books including Darwin hérétique and Univers parallèles. Known initially as a science historian, he now mainly advocates in defense of animals in the French media.
Josep Maria Esquirol Calaf is a Catalan philosopher, essayist and professor of philosophy at the University of Barcelona. He directs the Aporia Research Group, whose field of study is contemporary philosophy and, specifically, the relationship between philosophy and psychiatry.
