The topic of this literary impression is a description of the last days in the life of a bitch, which for many-years lived at the author's home in the Beskidy Mts.
In this introduction to the current issue the author drew attention to the enrootment of the contemporary discourse about animals in assorted philosophical and world outlook languages inherited from history, arguing that there is no cognitively innocent language for talking about animals. More, he brought to the fore the difficulties of linguistically (and not only) tackling the problem and the man-animal relation within the humanistic reflection on man. The texts presented in this issue of 'Konteksty' attempt to make the reader aware of the topicality and importance of the animal question.
This text is devoted to two most frequent and yet extremely different emotional attitudes of man toward other animals. These include: apparent interspecies approximation, consisting in cramming animals into patterns of specifically inter-human relations, and, a conviction that there occurs a total difference between 'them' and 'us', which triggers fear, if not aggression, in humans. Both of those positions and the resulting practice appear to be purely anthropocentric, in effect. However, along with changing consciousness and the language we use, such anthropocentrism is weakened and becomes, in many circles, a groundless attitude, if not arrogant and anachronistic indeed.
The presented essay analyses the animals appearing in the works of Franz Kafka, particularly often in the last years of the life of the author of The Trial. The realised conceptions are anticipated to a great extent by one of Kafka's earlier stories, 'A Report to an Academy', whose narrator is a chimpanzee subjected to humanisation. The fate of the leading protagonist could be treated as a concise history of anthropogenesis and, by following the example of Giorgio Agamben (L'aperto. L'uomo e l'animale), as the history of the origin and activity of the so-called anthropological machine, a motor force of the historization of man that places him outside the natural order. The subsequent stories by the author of The Metamorphosis continue those motifs, at the same time transcending the horizon delineated by them. The animal characters become increasingly ambiguous and are no longer animals or people concealed behind animal facades. The have turned into 'deformed' creatures, to cite an expression coined by Walter Benjamin in relation to the world of Kafka's works. The closing fragments of the essay analyse this 'deformed' world and the amorphous creatures populating it, especially Odradek, the protagonist of a brief text entitled 'The Householder's Concern'.
The authoress traced the fascinating and only slightly examined fragment of contemporary art: the distinct presence of animals in so-called new expression painting. By referring to numerous examples, she discussed animalistic motifs in twentieth-century art (i.a. R. Grzyb, M. Sobczyk, J. Modzelewski), indicating their biographical and purely aesthetic contexts.
This text, written by a naturalist and an ornithologist, has two aspects. On the one hand, it is a personal and, at same time, poetic record of an encounter with a flock of cranes in a woodland recess, and on the other hand it remains a professional account about the birds (their mating season, hatching, flights).
The article endeavours to propose a critical outline of the interpretation space within which the admirers of post-humanistic attempts at establishing a new economy of relations between the animal and human worlds recognise Giorgio Agamben as an adherent of the cassation of a caesura separating man from animals. This attribution, popular within the context of the animal studies energetically developing in recent years, proves to be difficult to maintain upon the basis of an unbiased acquaintance with Agamben's book 'L'uomo e l'animale'. A re-contextualisation of the Agamben project proposed in further parts of the sketch makes it possible to reconstruct the course of his argumentation from the viewpoint of a formula of post-humanistic anthropology (i.e. a non-anthropocentric anthropology) sought by this philosopher. From this vantage point, Agamben appears to be not so much a spokesman for the abolition of the anthropological difference as a supporter of its profanation, i. e. a neutralisation of its destructive effects.
The essay discusses a fundamental issue concerning the attitude towards the treatment of animals in terms of scientific experiments: are we able to apply a moral question to these beings? The author examines the logic of the physiologist frame of mind that ignores this question, taking as examples two individuals representing such an approach - the fictional Dr. Moreau from the novel by H. G. Wells and a 19th century scientist, Claude Bernard, who wrote Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. Rather than answering the question whether we should perform experiments on animals or not, the author insists on ensuring that the moral question about animals is on the agenda.
The authoress analysed a discussion about the origin of the Spanish corrida within the perspective of theses about its native (Iberian) character and attempts at undermining the vision of Europe as a world which 'since time immemorial' has witnessed globalisation (the migrations of people and animals, the dissemination of cultural contents, trade exchange, war conflicts, colonisation and political impact). Prime reflections pertain to the cultural identity of 'toro bravo' within the context of the presence of the bull in the mythologies, religions and art of numerous cultures (the Mediterranean basin).
In the background of this personal reflection (the author is a histopathologist) about medical experiments conducted on animals lies professional interest and medical practice. The author demonstrates the numerous ethical and cognitive complications associated with various attitudes towards such experiments. He argues that there are no simple solutions as regards medical research involving animals, and postulates to avoid unambiguous ethical fore-judgements in favour of a careful examination of each individual case.
In Western culture hunting has a long and historical lineage and is regarded as one of the cultural practices sanctioned by age-old tradition and customs. Today, despite the fact that it has ceased being a life necessity, it still remains a lively fragment of that culture. The hunt has turned into an exciting form of spending leisure time and a phenomenon situated between a hobby, entertainment and sport. The presented text seeks an answer to questions about the mythological dimension of the chase. The author carried out a critical deconstruction of the universal myth of the hunt upon the basis of two instructive books: Zbigniew Kruczynski's 'Farba znaczy krew' and Tomasz Matkowski's 'Polowaneczko'. He was interested in the real (and not merely imaginary) image in contemporary culture, and thus endeavoured to recreate the mental premises at the basis of hunting and to demonstrate their consequences (for Nature and man). Concluding, the authior asserted that the contemporary hunt is 'intellectual tomfoolery, a cultural absurdity and an ethical scandal' and demanded its delegalisation.
This concise sketch written from the standpoint of Christian theology is more of an attempt at posing an important question perturbing the believers than a radical and unambiguous solution to it. The author conducted a radical recapitulation of the Aristotelian-Thomist and Cartesian conceptions of the soul and interpretations dominating the European discourse on the soul. In doing so, he also discussed the biologist stands (evolutionism, etiology). The summary proclaims that there are certain reasons for believing that the immortal soul is due only to human beings. Nonetheless, the still prevalent ignorance about the animal 'interior' does not permit to authoritatively refuse this human privilege to animals.
A report by Eli Lothar concerning Parisian slaughterhouses, published in 1929 in the avantgarde periodical 'Documents', is actually an anthropological meditation about the symbolic borderline between that which is human and that which is animal...
Just as any other sort of photography, animal photography is neither the place nor the source of natural relations with the world. Photographic imagery, shaped within the progress of the art of depiction, creates a sui generis communiqué, which we receive while barely aware of its existence and believing that the photograph is rather a 'mirror of nature' and does not additionally manipulate our awareness. Photographs of pets, wild animals and game provide vast information about our reflections about animals. The titular 'snow panther' is a reference to Peter Matthiessen's 'The Snow Leopard', which proposes an alternative way of getting to know wild animals via respectful co-existence.
Humans possess the ability to recall past events. They can also imagine the course of future events. This phenomenon is known as mental time travel. The basis of travelling into subjective past lies in episodic memory. When we travel into subjective future we deal with planning, anticipation, as well as prospective memory. The basic scientific question that can be raised is as follows: are subjective time travels unique to Homo sapiens? Is the Bischof-Kohler hypothesis true? In this paper the author presents arguments and empirical data, which shed a different light on this issue.
Motor lateralization is the most widely described in literature type of the functional asymmetry appearing in the animals world. Probably it is related to simplicity to conduct research on it. Sometimes simple observations are sufficient to be able to assess which hemisphere is dominant in a particular behavior. This paper attempts to organize knowledge based on selected research results, ranging from invertebrates ending at primates mammals.
At present, the so-called “animal ethics“ is quite a standard part of bioethics. The moral dimension of humans´ attitudes to animals became a traditional and at the same time inspiring subject in the field, though such efforts are neither new nor unique in history. Contemporary ethics is not just a theory. It is in many ways closely related to particular forms of human practice. In veterinary ethics, for instance, certain biomedical aspects intertwine with so-called “animal ethical theory”.
The author attempts to conduct ethical evaluation of transplanting animal organs into human beings. She argues that such actions are inadvisable because they constitute an experiment on human being which usually leads to immediate death of the recipient. Moreover, costs connected with that type of practice are extremely high. The funds would be better spent on the development of other more promising methods of transplantology which do not bring such high risks connected with immunological reactions. Also, another risk connected with xenotransplantations would be excluded, namely the possibility of infecting human beings with animal diseases which are not serious in the case of animals but may be lethal to humans.
The immediate connection between animals and humans became the basis for a long-lasting and highly structured relationship which also found its place in art and poetry. Slovak poetry uses animal elements with great intensity and variety taking into account a number of aspects: human dependency on nature as environment; the animal ancestry of humans on the one hand and exceptional qualities and faculties that distinguish humans from animals; the hierarchical ordering of the world based on the evolutionary progression leading to the superiority of the human. Examples from Slovak Christian-based spiritual poetry show that animal elements are most commonly used for defining the human character and for testing moral values. Less common, although still numerous, are poems with de-humanized depictions of people that reveal a possible crisis of an individual or of society. Spiritual poetry also reveals a hidden tension between the declared high value of nature and the inherent anthropocentrism of both art and Christian religion which outline clear hierarchies.
The author aimed at a creating a typology of common ways of conceptualising the notion of the 'animal' in the Polish language and culture. He also indicated dependencies between the world outlook shaped under the impact of culture and the way of perceiving animals, and thus their treatment. Upon the basis of research material collected amidst 140 students it has been possible to indicate 13 ways of defining animals in everyday thought. Despite the extraction of ways of defining animals based on empathy, the dominating stand appears to be a supremacy definition, stressing man's superiority vis a vis animals-things. It recalls a reification interpretation enrooted in language and culture, which reduces animals to the role of useful products-raw material 'serving man'.
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