Throughout the centuries philosophers and poets alike have defended an essential difference—rather than a porous transition—between the human and animal. Attempts to assign essential properties to humans (e.g., language, reason, or morality) often reflected ulterior aims to defend a privileged position for humans..

This book shifts the traditional anthropocentric focus of philosophy and literature by combining the questions “What is human?” and “What is animal?” What makes this collection unique is that it fills a lacuna in critical animal studies and the growing field of ecocriticism. It is the first collection that establishes a productive encounter between philosophical perspectives on the human–animal boundary and those that draw on fictional literature. The objective is to establish a dialogue between those disciplines with the goal of expanding the imaginative scope of human-animal relationships. The contributions thus do not only trace and deconstruct the boundaries dividing humans and nonhuman animals, they also present the reader with alternative perspectives on the porous continuum and surprising reversal of what appears as human and what as nonhuman.

Introduction

Nandita Batra and Mario Wenning

I. Contesting Exceptionalism

1. Bridging the Abyss: Re-interpreting Heidegger’s Animals as a Basis for inter-species Understanding

Joshua A. Bergamin

2. Ramayana’s Hanuman—Animal, Human or Divine

Sukanya B. Senapati

3. Aesop: Figuring the Human/Animal Boundary

John Hartigan

II. Representing the Human-Animal Boundary

4. ‘Zones of Non-Knowledge’: Facing The Open with R. M. Rilke, Martin Heidegger, and Giorgio Agamben

Sabine Lenore Müller

5. The Avoidance of Moral Responsibility towards Animals: Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and the Human Animal Boundary

Tomaž Grušovnik

6. The Cattle in the Long Cedar Springs Draw

Gary Comstock

7. Re-writing the Human-Animal Divide: Humanism and Octavia Butler’s “Amborg”

Aparajita Nanda

8. Milton’s Elephant

James P. Conlan

III. Re-Situating the Human/Animal Boundary

9. The Moral Duties of Dolphins

Sara Gavrell Ortiz

10. Great Apes and Lesser Humans: Goodall and the Geographic Entangled in Uhuru

Kristian Bjørkdahl

11. The Empress and the Beast: Finding a Philosophical Voice in Fiction

Alison Suen

12. A Bestiary for the Anthropocene: The End of Nature and the Future of Animal Life on Planet Earth

Eduardo Mendieta