Animals, Empathy, and Anthropomorphism The Limits of Imagination

This open access book explores the role of imagination in animal ethics and its constitutive links to empathy/sympathy and anthropomorphism. The book argues for the constitutive role of imagination in ethical deliberation, but acknowledges that there exist important limits to its use. However, “limit” is here understood not merely negatively as restriction and insufficiency, but rather positively as “condition of possibility,” so what the book explores and analyses are the conditions for a positive and fruitful use of the imagination in ethics. The book uses as a “frame” the questions and issues raised in J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals to explore some central and salient themes.

1 Introduction: Limits, Possibilities, and Bats.- Part I The Limits of Imagination.- 2 The Challenge of Otherness: J.M. Coetzee vs Thomas Nagel.- 3 The Just and Loving Gaze of the Poet: Animals and Poetry.- 4 The Pitfalls of Embodiment: Imagination, Disability, Animality.- Part II The Limits of Empathy.- 5 Sympathy, Empathy, & Co.: Moral Sentimentalism and Its Discontents.- 6 Feeling One’s Way in an Intersubjective World: Phenomenology of Empathy.- 7 Listening to What the (Animal) Other is Saying: Empathy and Care.- Part III The Limits of Anthropomorphism.- 8 If a Chimp Could Talk: On the Advantages and Limits of Primatomorphism.- 9 Tentacular Logocentrism: Octopus Minds and Human Imagination.- 10 The Back of the Snake, or, Face to Face with the Other.- Epilogue: Batmom’s “World”-Traveling in Nonhuman Umwelten.

Carlo Salzani is guest research fellow at the Messerli Research Institute of Vienna, Austria.