Discussions of relativism and skepticism tend to focus on disagreement between cultures and between individual cognizers. They attend less to another phenomenon, namely, that the world seems different to different kinds of cognizers. The Socrates of Plato’s Theaetetus argues that Protagoras’ relativism also applies to frogs, pigs, monkeys, and even gods. Protagoras, however, dismisses this proposal. By contrast, the Ten Modes of Skepticism, formulated by the Pyrrhonian philosopher Aenesidemus, start with a mode that argues from variations among animals. The mode’s collection of variation among animal appearances can induce a kind of vertigo with regard to the question of whether there is a world of stable objects for us to refer to. But it also stipulates that there is a way the world appears to us, qua kind of cognizer. Attention to the First Mode, I argue, flags that Aenesidemus takes a causal, quasi-scientific approach. Appearances are causally shaped by the physiologies of different kinds of animals. They exhibit not only variation, but also regularity. Aenesidemus’ approach is thus a competitor of relativism, which arguably pays more attention to difference than to similarity.

Most definitions of empathy stress its interpersonal nature: Empathy requires a human sender and a human receiver, where all parties involved have the theoretical capacity to accurately understand each other’s minds. Because empathy is inherently interpersonal, some scholars have questioned whether empathy between humans and artificial intelligence as it currently exists (e.g., large language models) is “real.” However, the requirement for two minds, each with the theoretical capacity to fully understand the thoughts and emotions of the other, is also not clearly met in other domains where empathy is discussed, such as empathy between humans and non-human animals or empathy with nature. This chapter critically examines these assumptions about what is needed for empathy to occur, offering several possible sets of empathy requirements that researchers might engage with, and outlining potential challenges researchers might face if they adopt any particular set of requirements in their work. Ultimately, we pose the question of whether two minds and/or the ability for minds to understand each other are truly necessary for empathy, or whether all that is required for empathy to occur is an entity’s perception of giving or receiving it.

This is a playful dialogue written by Plutarch to highlight the deficiencies of human society. The setting is the island of the goddess Circe, who has transformed some of Odysseus’ sailors into pigs. When Odysseus asks that the sailors be returned to him, Circe suggests that he converse directly with them himself. Odysseus hears the arguments of his former sailors about the advantages of pig and animal life over that of human life, such as being better exemplars of courage and moderation as well as showing the capacity for reason and intelligence.

The 1880s marked the beginning of the golden age of matchbox label design, with a proliferation in the production of premium matchbox labels in Sweden. It was also a golden age for design more generally, with these design aesthetics having an impact on the Swedish match industry. This chapter showcases some of the matchbox labels produced during this period, featuring complex compositions and faithful reproductions of original illustrations and photographs.

When we expand exploration of death-related behaviors to include other-than-human animals, what might be learned about ways of expressing emotion around death? In this chapter I probe the contours of animal grief. Who in the animal kingdom grieves, and in what ways? Describing grief expressed by animals ranging from rattlesnakes to chimpanzees, orcas to elephants, and cats to dairy cows, I show that claims of human exceptionalism around grief and mourning can and should be challenged. Human uniqueness is not threatened by this stance, as our species’ mortuary rituals do indeed differ from others’. Understanding animal grief may not only enlighten us about the nature of human grief but also offer ways to think about ecological grief, the crushing sense of loss some people experience as the climate crisis forces changes upon the land, animals’ lives, and our lives. Throwing open questions that link animal grief, human grief, and ecological grief may sharpen awareness of our responsibilities to other creatures, a transformation that itself invites new paths of resilience and multispecies relating.

This chapter focuses on the aesthetic appeal of inanimate nature, plants, and animals. Hegel’s ontological privileging of living beings, and especially of animal bodies, comes hand in hand with their aesthetic privileging, and so particular focus is given to the beauty of animateness, and especially to that of animal bodies. It is argued that, while most appearances of animal life serve to disclose their finitude, and so their ontological dependency, there are striking moments in which their remarkable animateness stands out as such. And given that Hegel gives us good reason to think of life, in its ontology, as an essentially infinite and autonomous movement, this conspicuousness of animation provides us with an ephemeral glimpse of a more profound beauty. As the various dimensions of animation and its ways of appearing are explored in some detail, the chapter comes to argue, somewhat counter to Hegel though for Hegelian reasons, that it is particularly in animal movement – as opposed to the more static shape of the animal body, which is largely Hegel’s focus – that the full splendor of animateness is revealed.

This chapter examines the ways in which speech could become entangled with non-human orders of identity in medieval texts, at once as a theoretical concept and as a concrete effect of scribal mise en texte. The first part considers encyclopedic and literary works that imagined human speech as something other than the natural possession of humanity, situating this power within a complex coordination between the human, the bestial, and the divine. The second section uses these ideas at the margins of the medieval discourse on the rational-discursive faculty as a lens to interpret the effects of punctuation in medieval manuscripts containing works of beast literature, arguing that the right conditions came together in these codices for an analogous entanglement of human and non-human meanings to arise as a literal effect in the course of reading: The identities and utterances of speakers of different species could blur together on the page, highlighting ambiguities in the relationship between speech and species identity that were encoded into the composition of the works themselves.

This chapter investigates the outer limits of the Book of Nature: the medieval concept that the world is meant to be read and interpreted by humans in the manner of a book. Authors who invoked the Book of Nature presented the act of metaphorically “reading” the natural world as a way of shoring up human identity against its conceptual outside, with non-human animals imagined as letters inked onto the world’s pages. Drawing on a corpus of allegorical, encyclopedic, and literary texts, the chapter argues that this image was also haunted by a more subversive possibility: that species identity could become as confusing as a real medieval handwritten text, full of blottings and ill-formed letters that threaten to leave the relationship between speech and species in a state of irresolution. Like written letters, non-human animals could produce meanings in the human mind – but also like letters, they could just as easily descend back into their latent status as meaningless shapes.

This chapter examines ideas pertaining to the rational-discursive faculty and species difference that took shape within the discourses of medieval Judaism and Christianity. The chapter’s first section centers on two non-human animals described as speaking in the text of the Hebrew Bible: the serpent of the Garden of Eden and Balaam’s she-donkey. It argues that whereas works of serious exegesis by authors like Augustine and Maimonides downplayed the potentially radical significance of the talking done by these scriptural creatures, the medieval literary reimaginings of the same scenes indulged in drawing out the unorthodox implications of the non-human chatter. The chapter’s second part then considers Christian attitudes toward the naturalistic question of whether non-human animals outside the Bible actually do possess the rational-discursive faculty in some measure. Here, a clear progression can be observed over time: Despite the willingness of some early authors to humor this possibility, non-human animals gradually became barred from all conceptual access to rational thought.

This chapter provides a survey of iconographic themes found in the pottery, figurines, fibulas, terracotta, metalwork, jewelry, and seals produced across Greek-speaking communities. Rejecting a traditional assumption of close ties with the Homeric epics, the study combines two approaches to offer a more socially embedded understanding of image-making in early Greece. Examining the iconography within multiple contexts, from the types of objects on which imagery appears to their archaeological contexts and the material behavior associated with their use, reveals that not just politics but also social reproduction lay behind artistic development. Second, it demonstrates how expanding the discussion to the larger world of representations adds further dimensions to the ways in which the Greeks projected an imagined ideal society. Themes discussed include mourning, warriors and weapons, battle, hunting, horse culture, dance, abduction, divinities and religious iconography, animals, hybrid monsters, and mythic narrative. The developments of Geometric art can be understood as responses to the new complexities of social hierarchy and gender, access to the wider world, the growing integration of religious institutions into community life, and political alliances that constituted the experience of the city-state.

Through a close analysis of the diction used by medieval translators of the biblical narrative in which Adam names the non-human animals, this introduction presents the book’s scope and argument. The first human seems to have had no difficulty giving the other animals their names, his success implicitly communicating his dominance as a rational, speaking creature; exegetes like Augustine pressed this point, citing the naming narrative as evidence for humanity’s status as the only rational animal. However, the medieval translators who rendered the naming scene in words of their own seemed notably less confident than Adam, their texts differing from one another in ways that suggest the discovery of uncertainty and confusion, rather than intuitive transparency, where speech and species intersect. The difficulty reflects fundamental features of the medieval lexicon employed to articulate the relationship between speech, reason, and species identity: Crucial terms such as animal and beste were ambiguous and inconsistent in meaning, leaving the precise place of the rational-discursive faculty in a state of suspense.

This chapter considers the relationship between the rational-discursive faculty and species identity through the lens of the concepts of error and errancy. In a variety of cultural contexts, medieval audiences imagined that the act of “erring” – both in the etymological sense of wandering and the extended sense of moral fault – could function as an experience that troubled distinctions of species. The chapter uses this recurring fantasy as a lens to explore an intriguing phenomenon observable in manuscripts of the Roman de Renart: Scribes and the trickster fox whose tales they copied sometimes “err” in tandem with one another, with scribal slips of the pen overlapping ambiguously with beastly slips of the tongue. It argues that these disruptive situations enable unresolved questions about the place of the rational-discursive faculty to come to the fore, confronting readers with a surprising question: In whose subjectivity do the errors in question originate?

This chapter explores the range of philosophical, literary, and religious ideas about the rational-discursive faculty and species identity that medieval audiences inherited from ancient Greece and the Hellenizing poetry of ancient Rome. It argues that this inheritance was profoundly ambivalent. In both the medieval Ovide moralisé and Plato’s Timaeus, any cognitive differences between species become relativized by the assertion that souls continually transmigrate from one body to another; additionally, under certain circumstances, it seems as though the rational-discursive faculty can be located beyond the limits of the human being. Aristotle advanced a comparatively hardline position: Humans are the only rational animals (although certain creatures like parrots raise potential difficulties). On the level of literary fantasy, the “Philomena” tale of the Ovide moralisé and the Old Occitan Novas del papagay probed at the limits of the same questions investigated by ancient authorities and their medieval translators, the ambivalent details of their diction condensing some of the thorniest dilemmas hidden at the intersection of speech and species.

This chapter investigates the growth of medieval literary traditions descended from Aesop’s fables, which differed from their Late Antique predecessors in that they increased the proportion of non-human characters featured in their collections and amplified the prominence of non-human speech in the texts themselves. It argues that these developments contributed to a shift in the relationship between truth and fable, which had traditionally been antithetical: A “fable” was a synonym for a lie, since fables imagined scenes of beastly speech that could not happen in reality; to arrive at useful knowledge, readers were enjoined to ignore all the non-human chattering and focus on the morals. In these new literary works, the source of knowledge shifted to a point within the very field of non-human speech, with the speaking beast becoming a detour by which the most convoluted paradoxes of species identity could be explored in words.

Sellars, like Kant, adopts a conception of what is required for experience which makes it seem as if nonhuman animals could not have experience. This follows from what I call the Sellars–Kant Principle (SKP): the experience of a world requires an integrated holistic interpretation of the world and of oneself as a subject in that world. Nonhuman animals seem to lack the conceptual resources for such interpretation and hence would seem to be unable to experience the world. I argue that the SKP should be replaced by what I call the Activity Domain Principle: the experience of a domain requires an integrated holistic interpretation of a domain and of oneself as an agent in that domain. I distinguish three different kinds of the ADP: ADP-A (animal agency), ADP-M (mental agency), and ADP-D (discursive agency). This allows us to accept what is right in the Sellars–Kant rejection of empiricism while avoiding the implication that nonhuman animals lack experience tout court.