animals | ZETEO

What Is Permitted—To People and Bonobos

August 18, 2014 by Walter Cummins

The Sources of Morality By Walter Cummins Review of The Bonobo and the Atheist by Frans de Waal (W. W. Norton, 2013) [print_link] [email_link] Primatologist Frans de Waal in his book The Atheist and the Bonobo (W. W. Norton, 2013) uses bonobos to take on God, or more precisely those people who are convinced moral standards would not exist without the authority of a Supreme Being. From that perspective, morality is an attribute limited to the human realm, essential to our unique and special […]

Categories: Review • Tags: animals, ethics, literature, philosophy

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Interspecies communication

January 1, 2014 by William Eaton

Writing Science B (an essay published in Zeteo‘s Fall 2013 issue), was a thought experiment: imagining a possible though not actual science. In publication’s aftermath, however, I keep hearing news of scientists hard at work on projects that speak to one or another of the essay’s concerns. For example, in the final New Yorker of 2013, Michael Pollan writes about scientists who are investigating intelligence in plants. In what Pollan calls “a striking example of interspecies communication,” Suzanne Simard, a forest […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: animals, intelligence, inter-species communication, plants, science

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Eating Intelligent Beings

April 6, 2013 by Walter Cummins

Eating Intelligent Beings By Walter Cummins A review of: Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies by Margo DeMello (Columbia University Press, 2012) Animal Rights Without Liberation: Applied Ethics and Human Obligations by Alasdair Cochrane (Columbia University Press, 2012) Without Offending Humans: A Critique of Animal Rights by Élisabeth de Fontenay (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) Click for the pdf. Many studies in recent years have demonstrated that animals—from mammals to birds and insects—possess much greater intelligence, problem-solving […]

Categories: Review • Tags: animal rights, animals, Descartes, vegetarianism

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Books with Greatness in Them

October 1, 2012 by William Eaton

Take 1: October 2012 (1) In September of this year, the University of Minnesota Press sent me, at my request, a copy of a translation of the French philosopher Michel Serres’s Biogée, which the Press was distributing for a smaller publishing company, Univocal. As is my wont, I began reading the book to get an idea what it was like, whether it was indeed worth reviewing, and who among Zeteo’s ever-expanding corps of reviewers I should ask to review it. […]

Categories: Books with Greatness in Them, Review • Tags: animals, maps, Michel Serres

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Seeking Creatural Diversity

July 30, 2012 by Walter Cummins

A review of Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern Writers, by Juliana Schiesari (University of California Press, 2012) By Walter Cummins My friend, the poet Renée Ashley, a consummate dog lover, displays a sticker on the back of her car with a canine paw print and the words, “Who Saved Who?” It should be “Whom,” but no matter. The message might have served as an epigram for Juliana Schiesari’s study, which challenges the hierarchical assumptions of […]

Categories: Review • Tags: animals, cats, Colette, D.H. Lawrence, dogs, Hemingway, Juliana Schiesari