Animal Philosophy

As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we've inured ourselves to the wild intelligence of our muscled flesh, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. This audiobook subverts that distance, drawing listeners ever deeper into their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the body and the breathing Earth.

The history of European philosophy is usually constructed from the work of men. In Metaphysical Animals, a pioneering group biography, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman offer a compelling alternative. In the mid-twentieth century Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch were philosophy students at Oxford when most male undergraduates and many tutors were conscripted away to fight in the Second World War. Together, these young women, all friends, developed a philosophy that could respond to the war’s darkest revelations.

Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood - facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf - his casual questioning took on an urgency His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong.

Since its original publication in 1975, Animal Liberation has awakened millions of people to the existence of "speciesism"—our systematic disregard of nonhuman animals—inspiring a worldwide movement to transform our attitudes to animals and eliminate the cruelty we inflict on them. Now, for the first time since its original publication, Singer returns to the major arguments and examples and brings us to the current moment.

To flourish, humans need to develop virtues of independent thought and acknowledged social dependence. In this book, a leading moral philosopher presents a comparison of humans to other animals and explores the impact of these virtues.

I drop walnuts on roads to crack them open. Wheels are tools when you are too small; timing is a muscle; memory smells like your hand. If I could speak, I would not recite facts. I would hand you a broken shell and watch whether you understood why. This book is that hand—close, blunt, and exact. It follows the small acts that add up to a mind: the walnut, the wait, the face remembered across seasons, the dusk meeting where a thousand silent signals sort friend from threat. Read me if you want a map of cognition that never learned words. You will find tool-use stripped of wonder and recast...

From dolphins to crows, elephants to octopuses, Nussbaum examines the entire animal kingdom, showcasing the lives of animals with wonder, awe, and compassion to understand how we can create a world in which human beings are truly friends of animals, not exploiters or users. All animals should have a shot at flourishing in their own way. Humans have a collective duty to face and solve animal harm. An urgent call to action and a manual for change, Nussbaum’s groundbreaking theory directs politics and law to help us meet our ethical responsibilities as no book has done before.

Are humans the only dreamers on Earth? What goes on in the minds of animals when they sleep? When Animals Dream brings together behavioral and neuroscientific research on animal sleep with philosophical theories of dreaming. It shows that dreams provide an invaluable window into the cognitive and emotional lives of nonhuman animals, giving us access to a seemingly inaccessible realm of animal experience. The book carries profound implications for debates about animal cognition, animal ethics, and animal rights, challenging us to regard animals as beings who matter.

An entertaining and enlightening anthology of classical Greek and Roman writings on animals—and our vital relationships with them.

Dip below the ocean’s surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom — the Metazoa— they can teach us much about the evolutionary origins of not only our bodies, but also our minds.

En Libración animal, Peter Singer denuncia el «especismo» (el prejuicio de creer que existe una especie, la humana, superior a todas las demás) y expone la escalofriante realidad de las granjas industriales y los procedimientos de experimentación con animales, echando abajo las justificaciones que los defienden y ofreciendo alternativas a un dilema moral, social y medioambiental. Este libro es un persuasivo llamamiento a la conciencia, la decencia, y la justicia y una lectura esencial tanto para el ya convencido como para el escéptico.

"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." That warning holds double for me. I live in twilight and vibration, not your sentences: body pressed into grass, ears narrowing to a mouse's heartbeat, whiskers reading the gap before my paws. I am not a metaphor. I am a predator with a grammar of light, air, and scent—practical, urgent, and all of it felt. If a cat could teach you anything, it wouldn't teach kindness. It would teach attention. This book moves through the instruments of that attention—twilight sight, ears of silk, whiskers as touch-lidar, layered scent-maps, purrs and...

If a spider could speak, its sentences would be silk and vibration—and you would need new ears. I wait on threads. Wind, footfall, a breath across a leaf: each tremor names something. My eight eyes reduce the world to shadow and motion; my leg hairs and slit sensilla translate gravity and breath into decisions. I do not weave webs for beauty. I build instruments that listen, records that remember, traps that teach me what to trust. This book speaks from that listening. Short, sharp chapters move from waiting to sensing to thinking: how silk becomes an external mind, how plucked threads ...

Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure? What about crabs, shrimps, insects, or spiders? How do we tell whether a person unresponsive after severe brain injury might be suffering? When does a fetus in the womb start to have conscious experiences? Could there even be rudimentary feelings in miniature models of the human brain, grown from human stem cells? And what about AI? These are questions about the edge of sentience, and they are subject to enormous, disorienting uncertainty. We desperately want certainty, but it is out of reach.

The history of philosophy has been a predictably tragic or comical succession of palliatives for human disquiet. Thinkers from Spinoza to Berdyaev have pursued the perennial questions of how to be happy, how to be good, how to be loved, and how to live in a world of change and loss. But perhaps we can learn more from cats - the animal that has most captured our imagination - than from the great thinkers of the world. In Feline Philosophy, the philosopher John Gray discovers in cats a way of living that is unburdened by anxiety and self-consciousness....

"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." So listen instead to what does speak: the ant under your shoe, writing life in scent. I lay a trail that reads like a sentence, press my antennae to a sister for grammar, taste sugar and grit as punctuation. I do not speak; I broadcast maps, alarms, and care with chemicals and touch. In plain, unsentimental scenes I narrate how a single path becomes a mind — how food, brood, and danger are solved by bodies obeying small rules until they look like decisions. This is natural history pried open at the seam where science meets sensation. ...

"If a lion could speak, we would not understand him." I take that not as a wry thought but as a task: to live in a throat, to map life by scent, muscle, and the bookkeeping of hunger. I speak from the geometry of the hunt — the rasp of grass, the grunt of a falling hoof, the way blood rewrites the night — and I refuse your moral vocabulary. This book is not elegy or sermon. It is a field report written inside a body that measures everything by appetite, endurance, and the slow calculus of survival. Nine lean chapters move from the roar outward and back again: presence, hunger, pride, ...

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat is a highly entertaining and illuminating journey through the full spectrum of human-animal relations. Drawing on his groundbreaking research in the field of anthrozoology, Dr. Hal Herzog tries to make sense of our complex relationships with animals and the challenging moral conundrums we face regarding these creatures who share our world - and some, our homes. .

There has been a lot of ink devoted to discussions of how robots will replace us and take our jobs. But MIT Media Lab researcher and technology policy expert Kate Darling argues just the opposite, and that treating robots with a bit of humanity, more like the way we treat animals, will actually serve us better.

At first glance, human history is full of remarkable feats of intelligence. We invented writing. Produced incredible achievements in music, the arts, and the sciences. We’ve built sprawling cities and traveled across oceans—and space—and expanded to every part of the globe. Yet, human exceptionalism can be a double-edged sword. With our unique cognitive prowess comes severe consequences, including existential angst, violence, discrimination, and the creation of a world teetering towards climate catastrophe. Understood side-by-side, human exceptionalism begins to look more like a curse.