Thinking About Animals

Catalog description

This course will explore how western society has thought about and treated animals. Although we will begin with a brief look at animals in classical and Judeo-Christian thought, the bulk of this class will focus on philosophical and scientific thinking about animals during the age of humanism, from the fifteenth century to the present day. We will read texts which explore the relationship between animals and human beings, the practice of vivisection, and the history of animal slaughter and meat-eating. The first part of the class will be devoted to pre-modern texts about animals (Aristotle, Descartes, Montaigne, Boyle) and the second part of the class will focus on more modern philosophical and scholarly works on animals and the animal-human divide (Agamben, Singer, Derrida, etc.)