Thinking Through Animals Quotes

“In biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s illustrative phrase, human beings should be seen as a “tiny, late-arising twig on life’s enormously arborescent bush.”14 That”
― Matthew Calarco, Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction

“philosophers of difference are, in fact, hyperethical and radical political thinkers, concerned with how movements that seek to address marginalization need to become even more ethical, even more radical in their desire to change the status quo in view of justice.”
― Matthew Calarco, Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction

“The chief difference here is that thinking about the field of human beings and animals no longer takes its point of departure either from attempts to extend traditional human traits to animals (the identity approach) or from efforts aimed at complicating and multiplying anthropological differences (the difference approach). Instead, the indistinction approach aims to think about human beings and animals in deeply relational terms that permit new groupings and new differences to emerge, such that “the human” is no longer the center or chief point of reference.”
― Matthew Calarco, Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction

“In terms of the human/animal distinction, the philosophers we’re examining here all share an ontological perspective influenced by Charles Darwin that stresses the fundamental continuities found among human beings and animals. Rather than maintaining a sharp break between human and animal life (as Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant all do), Darwin places human beings squarely among animals, arguing that it is only human arrogance that would allow us to think we have non-animal, non-natural origins. Darwin is at great pains to demonstrate the phylogenetic continuity of all animals with life as a whole, and he stresses that there is “no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.”
― Matthew Calarco, Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction

“But we can note that, however the debates turn out with regard to any given claim concerning animal behavior, it is clear that facile attempts to maintain that all human beings are exclusively in possession of some particular trait or set of traits that nonhuman animals lack (language, self- consciousness, tool use, awareness of death, or some other capacity) are becoming ever less tenable.”
― Matthew Calarco, Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction

“Chapter 3 examines the indistinction approach, which aims to think about human- animal relations in a manner that deemphasizes the importance of human uniqueness and the human/animal distinction. Indistinction theorists and activists explore some of the surprising ways in which human beings find themselves to be like animals (which is rather different from the identity approach, which stresses how animals are like human beings), while also examining the varied ways in which animals demonstrate their own forms of agency, creativity, and potential.”
― Matthew Calarco, Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction