Anthropocentrism is a charge of human chauvinism and an acknowledgement of human ontological boundaries. Anthropocentrism has provided order and structure to humans’ understanding of the world, while unavoidably expressing the limits of that understanding. This collection explores the assumptions behind the label ‘anthropocentrism’, critically enquiring into the meaning of ‘human’. It addresses the epistemological and ontological problems of charges of anthropocentrism, questioning whether all human views are inherently anthropocentric. In addition, it examines the potential scope for objective, empathetic, relational, or ‘other’ views that trump anthropocentrism. With a principal focus on ethical questions concerning animals, the environment and the social, the essays ultimately cohere around the question of the non-human, be it animal, ecosystem, god, or machine.

Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents is the first-ever comprehensive examination of views of animals in the history of Western philosophy, from Homeric Greece to the twentieth century. In recent decades, increased interest in this area has been accompanied by scholars' willingness to conceive of animal experience in terms of human mental capacities: consciousness, self-awareness, intention, deliberation, and in some instances, at least limited moral agency. This conception has been facilitated by a shift from behavioral to cognitive ethology (the science of animal behavior), and by attempts to affirm the essential similarities between the psychophysical makeup of human beings and animals. Gary Steiner sketches the terms of the current debates about animals and relates these to their historical antecedents, focusing on both the dominant anthropocentric voices and those recurring voices that instead assert a fundamental kinship relation between human beings and animals. He concludes with a discussion of the problem of balancing the need to recognize a human indebtedness to animals and the natural world with the need to preserve a sense of the uniqueness and dignity of the human individual.

Today, there is growing interest in conservation and anthropologists have an important role to play in helping conservation succeed for the sake of humanity and for the sake of other species. Equally important, however, is the fact that we, as the species that causes extinctions, have a moral responsibility to those whose evolutionary unfolding and very future we threaten. This volume is an examination of the relationship between conservation and the social sciences, particularly anthropology. It calls for increased collaboration between anthropologists, conservationists and environmental scientists, and advocates for a shift towards an environmentally focused perspective that embraces not only cultural values and human rights, but also the intrinsic value and rights to life of nonhuman species. This book demonstrates that cultural and biological diversity are intimately interlinked, and equally threatened by the industrialism that endangers the planet's life-giving processes. The consideration of ecological data, as well as an expansion of ethics that embraces more than one species, is essential to a well-rounded understanding of the connections between human behavior and environmental wellbeing. This book gives students and researchers in anthropology, conservation, environmental ethics and across the social sciences an invaluable insight into how innovative and intensive new interdisciplinary approaches, questions, ethics and subject pools can close the gap between culture and conservation.

Anthropocentrism in philosophy is deeply paradoxical. Ethics investigates the human good, epistemology investigates human knowledge, and antirealist metaphysics holds that the world depends on our cognitive capacities. But humans’ good and knowledge, including their language and concepts, are empirical matters, whereas philosophers do not engage in empirical research. And humans are inhabitants, not 'makers', of the world. Nevertheless, all three (ethics, epistemology, and antirealist metaphysics) can be drastically reinterpreted as making no reference to humans.

Roberto Marchesini presents a timely proposal within post-human philosophy in order to overcome the centuries-long separation between human beings, non-human animals and technology. This book highlights the inspiring nature of the relationship with non-human beings – what Marchesini calls “Epiphany” – and how its enhancement can open new existential dimensions. Technology is also reinterpreted, no longer as a performative tool, but as a virus that infiltrates the human dimension and changes its predicates. Technopoietic events are not just the product of human intelligence, but they arise from an epiphany (a becoming alterity), thus positioning technology well within the ontological and somatic dimension of human beings. This book lays the foundations for a new and non-anthropocentric Humanism, which is able to recognize the essential role that non-human alterities have had throughout our history.

This handbook explores, contextualises and critiques the relationship between anthropocentrism – the idea that human beings are socially and politically at the centre of the cosmos – and international law. While the critical study of anthropocentrism has been under way for several years, it has either focused on specific subfields of international law or emanated from two distinctive strands inspired by the animal rights movement and deep ecology. This handbook offers a broader study of anthropocentrism in international law as a global legal system and academic field. It assesses the extent to which current international law is anthropocentric, contextualises that claim in relation to broader critical theories of anthropocentrism, and explores alternative ways for international law to organise relations between humans and other living and non-living entities. This book will interest international lawyers, environmental lawyers, legal theorists, social theorists, and those concerned with the philosophy and ethics of ecology and the non-human realms.

This book is an analysis of literary texts that question, critique, or subvert anthropocentrism, the notion that the universe and everything in it exists for humans. Bryan Moore examines ancient Greek and Roman texts; medieval to twentieth-century European texts; eighteenth-century French philosophy; early to contemporary American texts and poetry; and science fiction to demonstrate a historical basis for the questioning of anthropocentrism and contemplation of responsible environmental stewardship in the twenty-first century and beyond. Ecological Literature and the Critique of Anthropocentrism is essential reading for ecocritics and ecofeminists. It will also be useful for researchers interested in the relationship between science and literature, environmental philosophy, and literature in general.

Dialogo Ergo Sum: from a Reflexive Ontology to a Relational Ontology, R. Marchesini - The Party of the Anthropocene: Post-humanism, Environmentalism and the Post-anthropocentric Paradigm Shift, F. Ferrando - From Anthropocentrism to Post-humanism in the Educational Debate, A. Ferrante e D. Sartori - Senseless Distributions: Posthumanist Antidotes to the Mass Hermit, D. Sisto - The Post-human Sound: an Interview with Michelangelo Frammartino, A. Lanfranchi - Against Animal Rights? A Comment on Contro i diritti degli animali? Proposta per un antispecismo postumanista (Against Animal Right? A Proposal to a Post-human Antispeciesism), by R. Marchesini, A.G. Biuso - Posthuman Glasses for Nomadic Subjectivities: a Comment on Il postumanesimo filosofico e le sue alterità (Philosophical Posthumanism and Its Others), by F. Ferrando, A. Balzano - Reviews: LNRZ, Golem (2014); LNRZ, Astrogamma (2015), V. Gamberi - Alessandro Ferrante, Pedagogia e orizzonte post-umanista (2014), C. Palmieri - Davide Sisto, Narrare la morte. Dal romanticismo al post-umano (2013), C. Rebuffo - Wajdi Mouawad, Anima (2015), D. Zagaria - Her (2013), film directed by Spike Jonze, A. Lanfranchi e G. Ravanelli.

This book explores the relationship between humanity and nature while challenging the notion that anthropocentric behaviour causes the environmental catastrophes depicted in the four selected British eco-science fiction novels. These novels are John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), J. G. Ballard’s The Drought (1965), Brian Aldiss’s Earthworks (1965), and John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up (1972), all of which fictionalise the fact that the consequences of environmental problems can be diverse but equally serious. This book examines how even the smallest damage caused by human beings to the environment negatively affects them, other living beings, and the ecosystem they need to live and flourish. In conjunction with these, the factors and conditions that push characters in the novels to ignore and harm the environment are also scrutinised. While examining how and why the environmental problems in the novels have arisen, it is evaluated whether the authors propose solutions to these problems and, if so, what they are.

CONTENTS: Dialogo Ergo Sum: from a Reflexive Ontology to a Relational Ontology, R. Marchesini – The Party of the Anthropocene: Post-humanism, Environmentalism and the Post-anthropocentric Paradigm Shift, F. Ferrando – From Anthropocentrism to Post-humanism in the Educational Debate, A. Ferrante e D. Sartori – Senseless Distributions: Posthumanist Antidotes to the Mass Hermit, D. Sisto – The Post-human Sound: an Interview with Michelangelo Frammartino, A. Lanfranchi – Against Animal Rights? A Comment on Contro i diritti degli animali? Proposta per un antispecismo postumanista (Against Animal Right? A Proposal to a Post-human Antispeciesism), by R. Marchesini, A.G. Biuso – Posthuman Glasses for Nomadic Subjectivities: a Comment on Il postumanesimo filosofico e le sue alterità (Philosophical Posthumanism and Its Others), by F. Ferrando, A. Balzano – Reviews: LNRZ, Golem (2014); LNRZ, Astrogamma (2015), V. Gamberi – Alessandro Ferrante, Pedagogia e orizzonte post-umanista (2014), C. Palmieri – Davide Sisto, Narrare la morte. Dal romanticismo al post-umano (2013), C. Rebuffo – Wajdi Mouawad, Anima (2015), D. Zagaria – Her (2013), film directed by Spike Jonze, A. Lanfranchi e G. Ravanelli.