What follows below is an article on Karen Barad’s work that I wrote in 2013. As it turned out, for reasons I won’t go into…
Stories of children raised by animals or isolated in the wilderness changed radically in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. What had once been stories of…
Some of us, at any rate, have been told for millennia that we are the rational, mortal animal. Rational things are able to reason; mortal…
Marcy Norton‘s “The Chicken or the Iegue: Human-Animal relationships and the Columbian Exchange” (The American Historical Review 120.1 (2015): 28-60) begins with an anecdote about…
Some form of the word “reason” appears more than 100 times in The Consolation of Philosophy.[1]Thank you to The University of Oslo’s Bibliotheca Polyglota website, whose…
The Consolation of Philosophy culminates by proving that God’s omniscience does not prevent humans from exercising “free will.”[1]Trans. P. G. Walsh for Oxford World’s Classics,…
It’s a well-known story among the people who like these kinds of stories. First appearing in medieval chronicles by Ralph of Coggeshill and William of…
Among the now famous feline musings of the first chapter of Derrida’s The Animal that therefore I am is this one, about the cat’s name:…
Fables are short, self-consciously fictitious narratives generally furnished with a moral interpretation, either before the fable (a promythium) or after it (an epimythium). They often travel in…
My first post for my “Reason, Freedom, and Animality” seminar explored the Stoic paradox that “all fools are slaves, and all wise men are free”…
