Philosophy and Animal Life

These challenging but richly rewarding philosophical essays that explore the complex interrelations between human morality and the animal world. This book explores what it means to be human as much as what it means to be a creature.

As a literature professor, I found the book interesting and relevant to contemporary discourseses on ethics. Fans of Coetzee will pleased.

Finally, I’m free from the cult of utilitarianism

Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe (all but the last being professors of philosophy) examine a range of issues surrounding animals--with particular attention being given to J.M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals. I was struck in reading the book how much writing style matters in framing an argument: Cavell and Diamond are discursive (sometimes annoyingly so) whereas Wolfe is dense and allusive (sometimes bafflingly so). Both Hacking and McDowell bring in their own experiences with ideas in a way that is refreshingly personal. More than anyone, Diamond reminded me of how brilliantly Coetzee fashions the personality of Costello as an exemplum of the limitations of philosophy--forcing us to recognize the pain, inexplicability, and the unsuitability-for-the-academy that the artist must confront (and that the suffering of animals encapsulates). In that regard, this volume is at its core an examination of how philosophical language faces up to/comes face to face with/faces down the language of poetry, fiction, and even photography in attempting to describe (what we know about) animals, and, beyond that, what it is possible to know at all. As I found when I read The Lives of Animals, analytic or moral philosophers tend to circumscribe how they talk about what is going on In the Lives of Animals (and in his work in general)--a point made by a number of folks in this volume--and so fail, I think, to capture Coetzee's subtlety and depth and the perturbation that his writing causes. Diamond comes close and I think Wolfe (the only non-philosopher) does well. But Coetzee is "ahead" of all of us, I think. This book suffers a little from not being edited (the chapters are all collected speeches and could have been tightened and the typos fixed), but it is an intellectually stimulating volume that I recommend.