The History of Animals: A Philosophy
Ebook
Ebooks are designed for reading and have few connections to your library.
Overview
Oxana Timofeeva's The History of Animals: A Philosophy is an original and ambitious treatment of the "animal question". While philosophers have always made distinctions between human beings and animals, Timofeeva imagines a world free of such walls and borders. Timofeeva shows the way towards the full acceptance of our animality; an acceptance which does not mean the return to our animal roots, or anything similar. The freedom generated by this acceptance operates through negativity; is an effect of the rejection of the very core of metaphysical philosophy and Christian culture, traditionally opposed to our 'animal' nature and seemingly detached from it.
With a foreword by Slavoj Žižek, this book is accessible, jargon-free and ideal for students and all those interested in re-imagining how we engage with animals and the environment.
A novel yet comprehensive exploration of the history of animals in philosophy. The book features and original foreword from Slavoj Žižek.
Animal studies and philosophies of animals has become and increasingly important area within the humanities
The foreword is by Slavoj Žižek one of the most famous philosophers in the world. It is completely new material and his opinions on animal life are not widely known
The author, Oxana Timofeeva, is a globally recognised expert on the position of animals in politics and philosophy
The book is written in an extremely clear, jargon-free style but without sacrificing on rigour. Ideal for a student audience
preface
acknowledgements
Foreword by Slavoj Žižek
1. Oedipus the Horse
2. Before the Law
3. The Insane
4. Insecure, Anxious and Unhappy
5. Unemployed Animality
6. Dialectics of the Fish
7. The Shepherd of Being
8. Poor Life
bibliography
index
[A] unique and extensive historical analysis of various conceptions of the animal and animality in Western thought … Timofeeva's scholarship is impressive ... [The] book is thought provoking and an excellent resource for those interested in the place of the animal and animality in Western thought. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
Oxana Timofeeva's The History of Animals is an original and sweeping treatment of the "animal question". While philosophers have always made distinctions between human beings and animals, Timofeeva imagines a world free of such walls and borders.
If philosophy is the love of wisdom, then Oxana Timofeeva's The History of Animals is a work of philosophy as the love for animals. Refusing to simply condemn philosophy for its mistreatment of animals, this book reconstructs how philosophers from Aristotle to Deleuze might be read to restore the philosophical dignity of animals. The History of Animals teaches us, us humans, to join with all the 'revolutionary animals' to win a new world.
This is a tour de force of originality and scholarship. Neither affirming the ethical or metaphysical equivalence of animals with humans, nor restoring an essential divide, her powerful genealogy of the animal in modern thought destroys any sense of purity or simplicity. What has come to be known as 'the human' has configured itself through a series of impossible relations to species that are at one and the same time enigmatic, proximate, anthropomorphized, alien and companionable. This book is a must read for anyone working in posthumanism or animal studies.
- Title: The History of Animals: A Philosophy
- Authors: Slavoj Žižek, Oxana Timofeeva
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2018
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 192
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781350012028, 9781350012011, 1350012017, 1350012025
- Resource ID: LLS:9781350012028
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T10:23:03Z
Oxana Timofeeva is Senior Lecturer in Political Science and Sociology at the European University at St. Petersberg, Russia.
Slavoj Žižek is one of the world's leading contemporary cultural critics and a hugely prolific author. He is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, UK, and Visiting Professor at the New School for Social Research, New York, USA.