This book, whose title can be translated into English as The Deanthropized Animal: Questioning and Redefining Concepts, tackles the following questions: Is there a concept that is unique to human beings, for instance, a capacity that is possessed solely by human beings? Can notions like rationality, intelligence, language, and culture be applied to nonhuman animals? If so, how should they be defined from now on? By the same token, this book challenges a hierarchical account of human and nonhuman animals’ status. The latter has been dominant in the history of Western thought and has rested on the assumption of human uniqueness. For centuries, philosophers have justified human dominion over other animals by arguing that human beings are the only beings capable of reasoning, moral thought, or laughter.
L'animal désanthropisé has two goals. First, authors aim at “deanthropizing” (désanthropiser) concepts, by which they mean to adopt definitions that...
