Includes bibliographical references (pages 311-324) and index

Contemporary debates on the status of animals -- Epic and pre-Socratic thought -- Aristotle and the Stoics : the evolution of a cosmic principle -- Classical defenses of animals : Plutarch and Porphyry -- The status of animals in medieval Christianity -- Descartes on the moral status of animals -- The empiricists, the utilitarians, and Kant -- Conceptions of continuity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries : Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Schweitzer -- Postmodern conceptions of the human-animal boundary -- Rethinking the moral status of animals

[This book] is the ... examination of views on animals in the history of Western philosophy, from pre-Socratics to the postmoderns. As [the author] points out, anthropocentrism has been the historically dominant view, based in part on a theocentric view which places the moral status of humans in a position superior to that of animals and inferior to that of a supreme being (or beings). Humans have seen themselves as unique in their capacity to achieve the status of "lords of nature"; they have therefore used animals as instruments to serve their needs. But [the author] also wants to show that throughout history there has been a smaller, less visible contingent of heterodox thinkers who have argued for the rights and status of animals. Their dissatisfaction with self-asserted human superiority and the resulting injustices that have been done to animals forms the basis of [the author's] reexamination of Western philosophy.-Dust jacket