Brutal Reasoning

Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8077940
AutoresPramod K Nayar (0000-0003-2317-6570, autor de correspondencia), Erik Fudge (0000-0001-6903-7205, autor de correspondencia)
Año2008
Volumen39
Número2
Páginas527-528
Fecha de publicación2008-06-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSixteenth Century Journal (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0361-0160 • E-ISSN: 2326-0726
EditorialUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2307/20478936
OpenAlexW100786441
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas17

Early modern English thinkers were fascinated by the subject of animal rationality, even before the appearance of Descartes's Discourse on the Method (1637) and its famous declaration of the automatism of animals. But as Erica Fudge relates in Brutal Reasoning, the discussions were not as straightforward-or as reflexively anthropocentric-as has been assumed. Surveying a wide range of texts-religious, philosophical, literary, even comic-Fudge explains the crucial role that reason played in conceptualizations of the and the animal, as well as the distinctions between the two. Brutal Reasoning looks at the ways in which humans were conceptualized, at what being human meant, and at how humans could lose their humanity. It also takes up the questions of what made an animal an animal, why animals were studied in the early modern period, and at how people understood, and misunderstood, what they saw when they did look. From the influence of classical thinking on the human-animal divide and debates surrounding the rationality of women, children, and Native Americans to the frequent references in popular and pedagogical texts to Morocco the Intelligent Horse, Fudge gives a new and vital context to the perception of animals in this period. At the same time, she challenges overly simplistic notions about early modern attitudes to animals and about the impact of those attitudes on modern culture

Aesthetics · Animal ethics · Anthropocentrism · Context (archaeology · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Humanity · Period (music · Political science · Rationality · Sociology · Subject (documents · Animal Law and Welfare · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology