From animal trials to the animal advocacy movement: A Foucauldian reflection on the animal question

Emre Koyuncu, Purdue University

Abstract

The philosophical literature on the animal question has grown significantly in the last few decades. Today many philosophers both in analytic and continental traditions criticize the ontological privilege traditionally granted to human beings and the ethical and political ramifications of it by challenging the boundaries set between human beings and animals. Most of the works in the field, however, are speculative inquiries that lack a historical perspective on the subject or at best they extrapolate a history of anthropocentrism from an analysis of the human-animal divide in the thoughts of individual philosophers from different periods. The aim of this study is to go beyond a speculative engagement of this type and to historicize, by adopting the approach developed in the work of a great contemporary French philosopher Michel Foucault, the animal question by exploring how the human-animal divide is enacted and sometimes modified through social rituals and politico-legal institutions as well as in the scientific enterprise. In order to highlight the significance of a historical perspective and to establish the usefulness of this Foucauldian approach to the animal question, the study turns to the tradition of animal trials in the medieval and early modern Europe, a phenomenon widely overlooked both in the cultural histories of law and in the current debates on the legal status of animals. Drawing on Foucault's distinctive conception of knowledge and power, this study seeks to substantiate the following two claims: a) the contemporary animal advocacy movement with its philosophical and scientific foundations conforms to the anthropologism of the modern era, and b) power invests as much in the animal body as it does in the human body. Formulated in this way, the animal question takes on a historical and embodied form.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Plotnitsky, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Philosophy|Animal sciences

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