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"This book engages with the changing ways in which we, as a society and culture, look upon and interact with animals, stressing how much animals differ among themselves. An invitation to appreciate the peculiar role of animals in telling important if uncomfortable truths about who we are and where we are heading - namely, towards a world so much poorer in cultural, moral, and biological diversity - as a result of the ongoing decimation of so many other species. Drawing on a variety of thought ranging from that of Midgley and Murdoch to Levinas, Derrida and Habermas, from ecophilosophers to conservation biologists, Animal Lives and Why They Matter asks how we have come to this, and what an alternative, less destructive approach to our now precarious co-existence with animals might look like. Spanning the disciplines of philosophy, psychology and anthropology, this enquiry into various cross-species relationships and encounters will appeal to scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences with interests in philosophy, ethics, human-animal interaction and environmental thought"--

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Preface -- Introduction -- Part One -- 1. From Aristotle to Emotivism-and Back Again -- 2. Hannah Arendt and the Crisis of Judgment -- 3. Scheler's Grounding of Ethics in Love -- Part Two -- 4. The Perception of the Moral -- 5. Emotions and Immorality -- Part Three -- 6. Empathy and Solidarity in Habermas's Discourse Ethics -- 7. Morality, Emotions, and Gender -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

From Anthropocentrism to the Anthropocene -- Getting it right about mind, nature, and cosmos -- Panpsychism as inner physics: Whitehead's project -- Prospects and pitfalls of agential realism -- Animism panpsychism in practice -- Agency posthumanist style: proliferation or decimation?

Introduction : confronting the end of nature -- 1. The foundational fantasy goes global -- 2. Nature deficit in critical theory -- 3. Philosophizing value in nature -- 4. Technology, encounter, and the dangers of abstraction -- Conclusion : revindicating panpsychism.

Evil is a poorly understood phenomenon. In this provocative 2005 book, Professor Vetlesen argues that to do evil is to intentionally inflict pain on another human being, against his or her will, and causing serious and foreseeable harm. Vetlesen investigates why and in what sort of circumstances such a desire arises, and how it is channeled, or exploited, into collective evildoing. He argues that such evildoing, pitting whole groups against each other, springs from a combination of character, situation, and social structure. By combining a philosophical approach inspired by Hannah Arendt, a psychological approach inspired by C. Fred Alford and a sociological approach inspired by Zygmunt Bauman, and bringing these to bear on the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, Vetlesen shows how closely perpetrators, victims, and bystanders interact, and how aspects of human agency are recognized, denied, and projected by different agents

The significance of being an intellectual when taken prisoner and sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis is rarely discussed – instead, the importance of being either a Jew or a political prisoner (say, a German communist) is highlighted. By contrast, Jean Amery's recollections of being tortured and sent to Auschwitz concentrate on his self-understanding as an intellectual. What difference does the identity and outlook as an intellectual make in the extreme circumstances found in Auschwitz? The paper discusses Amery's views on this question, invoking that of others who have also addressed it, like Primo Levi and Theodor Adorno.

The significance of being an intellectual when taken prisoner and sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis is rarely discussed – instead, the importance of being either a Jew or a political prisoner (say, a German communist) is highlighted. By contrast, Jean Amery's recollections of being tortured and sent to Auschwitz concentrate on his self-understanding as an intellectual. What difference does the identity and outlook as an intellectual make in the extreme circumstances found in Auschwitz? The paper discusses Amery's views on this question, invoking that of others who have also addressed it, like Primo Levi and Theodor Adorno.

It appears that Naess thought his ecophilosophy could do without ethics. What made him think so? Since Naess was largely implicit about his metaethical views, I turn to Warwick Fox' elaborate presentation of Naess' ecophilosophy to find an answer. Doing so allows me to investigate what is insufficiently accounted for in Naess' ecophilosophy, namely its ontological presuppositions. To be philosophically sound, Naess' criticisms of ethics need to question the taboo against the so-called naturalistic fallacy, a commonplace in ethical theories since Hume. I argue that a realist notion of value—understood as a property of nature, operative in nature—provides ecophilosophy with a sorely needed ontological foundation.

Hiroshima was the first sign of the possibility of the human-inflicted devastation of the natural as well as the human world. But the potential for destruction is greater than it was in August 1945. It is now incumbent upon philosophy and critical though to consider the contemporary destruction of the non-human species and ecology upon which continued human life depends. This paper uses Hiroshima as a point of entry into consideration of the need now to think beyond anthropocentrism and instead to think more ecologically.