Contributions by:
Paola Cavalieri
Every age needs heroes. Even more so an age dominated by new wars and new dangers. Heroes are usually handsome, courageous and committed to the defense of the weak, especially innocents whose lives are being threatened for no good reason. Paul Watson, who has been apprehended in Greenland in relation to a Red Notice issued…
Read Full Article...I In the third century AD the Neo-Platonic philosopher Porphyry offered with his De abstinentia an impressive case for a radical change in the ethical treatment of nonhumans. In summarizing past debates and rebutting rationalizations for animal exploitation, Porphyry dealt with many traditional philosophical objections. Among them, one is particularly ambitious. Attributed by Porphyry to…
Read Full Article...Many are the phenomena that can light the path towards the emancipation of oppressed beings. Among them, there are sometimes processes that society spontaneously generates, and that can develop in unexpected circumstances. Something of this kind is happening now. The circumstance is war, and the oppressed beings are nonhuman animals. Pen Farthing and the Flight…
Read Full Article...Strategies of Exclusion Are animals “bons à penser” (good to think [with])?1 According to French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the answer to this question is positive. As is well-known, Levi-Strauss’s claim referred to the specific role played by animals in symbolic thought. But if one asked the same question in a more general sense, the answer…
Read Full Article...THE PREMISES In the first half of the nineteenth century, a white sperm whale of prodigious size and strength terrorized whalers1 off Chile. Mocha Dick, as the whale came to be known, retaliated with audacity and cunning when attacked. According to a contemporary report, in one occasion he suddenly breached to come to the aid…
Read Full Article...In a book tellingly entitled Without Offending Humans. A Critique of Animal Rights,[1]philosopher Elisabeth de Fontenay thus summarizes her disdain for an argument aimed at extending equal moral and legal protection to other than human beings: What seems most serious is a [passage] that condemns article 3 of the Nuremberg code. Ethico-political insensitivity and a…
Read Full Article...The Covid 19 crisis that is ravaging the world, killing thousands and infecting millions, subverting democracies and exacerbating autocracies through state of emergency, and uprooting, starving or pauperizing entire populations, has a geopolitical origin – Wuhan, China – a socio-anthropological origin – the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market – and a biological origin – the mixture…
Read Full Article...Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history. Yuval Noah Harari[1] I. Philosophical Controversies in the Antagonistic Area Since the beginning of the first decade of this century, three among the leading philosophers of the leftist galaxy, Antonio (Toni) Negri,…
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The (Sad) Fable of Humanity
Adorno’s humanism is radical both in its stubborn desire to retain the human coupled with its willingness to concede the end of the fable of humanity.[1] There was once a small tribe of primates… “Archaeology is demolishing a sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of…
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