How do we know if animals can think? In extension of the previous debate on human-animal relations, this book analyzes the conditions and contexts of the scientific acquisition of our knowledge of animals. The current discussions within animal philosophy revolve around the three central questions of whether we can attribute a mind to animals, what…[Read more]

In current debates about the relationships between humans and nonhuman animals, knowledge about animals is often adopted from the sciences. However, this largely ignores the fact that relationships of this kind also exist in empirical animal research and that these constellations between researchers and the researched have both ethical and…[Read more]

Animal welfare and animal rights issues have reached the curricula, agendas and priorities of a wide range of educational institutions and initiatives. Their actors are faced with the challenge of not only explaining the relevance of animal ethics and animal rights, but also conceptualising how to teach them: How can animal protection and animal…[Read more]

Announcement for the opening of the exhibition “Eden and Everything After” at the University of Stavanger Archaelogical Museum and publication of attendant catalogue.

Lynn Margulis’s writing about symbiosis has profoundly influenced contemporary evolutionary theory, as well as continental and analytic philosophy of science, the materialist turn, and new materialism. Nonetheless, her work, and all symbiosis or evolution, is founded on a paradox: symbiosis fictionalizes customary accounts of the origin and e…[Read more]

The connection between warfare and an increased wolf presence or even wolf attacks is a recurrent theme in European narrative sources. Many historical studies have also commented on the widespread belief in this connection and suggested that armed conflicts instigated a breakdown of the standard wolf-human relationship. In peacetime, wolves…[Read more]

Using the ecosystem concept as his starting point, the author examines the complex relationship between premodern armed forces and their environment at three levels: landscapes, living beings, and diseases. The study focuses on Europe’s Meuse Region, well-known among historians of war as a battleground between France and Germany. By analyzing s…[Read more]

This is about the social construction of nonhuman animals and our oppressive relationship with them. It is about texts and animals, as well as such things as feminism, history, racism, mass violence, animal farming, animal experimentation……well a whole lot of things! It seeks to understand our normalization of violence against nonhuman animals…[Read more]

In a groundbreaking endeavour to triangulate three important traditions of our collective cultural heritage, the Arkeologisk Museum of the University of Stavanger presents Eden and Everything After, a conceptual exhibition organised around notions of the loss of – and slim hope of reconnection with – the lost paradise. Mirroring the boldly exp…[Read more]

In 2016 the Chinese infant formula company Feihe International signed a deal with the Canadian Dairy Commission (CDC) to process Canadian cows’ and goats’ milk for infant formula export to China. Our purpose in this paper is to understand how this deal – and the new Feihe formula factory located in Kingston, Canada – is underpinned by a series…[Read more]

An interview with artist Anna Ridler for Antennae’s “Visual Entanglements” series.

I examine the anthropocentric and sentimentalist views present in the representation of animals in Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” and “A Sentimental Journey”, and I demonstrate how the fluctuations between these two perspectives undermines the traditional barrier we place between animals and ourselves, and encourages us to assume a more crit…[Read more]

contents

i. re Gödel’s ontological argument
ii. deep in pi’s numeric noise
iii. from Nothing, something
iv. endless in the wrong direction, tragic
v. they give you all Eternity to answer
vi. what of God’s mercy?
vii. informed consent and prayer
viii. i won’t live on, perhaps. a deed i’ve done may
ix. my selective memory
x. Janus…[Read more]

In Kant’s Critique of Judgment, his exploration of how something like life (organized matter) can appear to the faculties of a finite consciousness makes life as possible as it is impossible. A passing reference Kant makes to the idea that every organ of an organism can be seen as a parasite is taken as a lever to deconstruct his notion of…[Read more]

This essay deconstructs Jane Bennett’s and Erwin Schrödinger’s theories of life to demonstrate the untenability of defining life on the basis of either identity (relation to self) or difference (relation to other). Because the living thing is undecidably self and other, its traditional bond to the self-relation of teleology is untenable. Yet reli…[Read more]

A typical cow on Earth at the turn of the 21st century is figured as an information-generating machine. She generates data from the time she is born, at every developmental milestone, with the birth, growth, and death of each of her calves, including birth, weaning, and yearling weight, calving ease, and feeding data that help farmers compute…[Read more]

Discussing ecological justice in conservation and environmental ethics.

This paper examines the agency of the dogs used to develop the Soviet manned space flight programme by considering what the dogs did as experimental subjects, as dog technologies, and as individual dogs in the context of the historically conditioned practices of Soviet science. Looking at how Soviet space researchers refined Pavlovian behaviourism…[Read more]