PHIL 4415 Thinking Animals

This course will take a critical look at the conventional wisdom of human exceptionalism and anthropocentric bias in light of a more current scientific paradigm. The course will explore such questions as: Do nonhuman animals matter morally? What oblicagtions might we have toward them? Should animals have rights? Which rights? Equal rights? or is rights even the best way to think about this? How can we restore right relations between us and our animal kin? What are the justice implications -- both inter-human and inter-species - of the ways in which we treat other beings? We thinking animals will try to think of the thinking animals within and as living others.