Week 0 (Jan 11): Organizational meeting

We get to know one another a little and go over various organizational matters so that we can hit the ground running the following week.

Week 1 (Jan 18): John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”

An essay that explores the ways in which animals have receded from our lives in the modern world. Humans used to live closely with animals but now we see them mostly as pets or through the bars of a zoo.

Week 2 (Jan 25): Peter Singer, “All Animals Are Equal”

Singer’s book, Animal Liberation (1975), is often credited with launching the modern animal liberation movement. He argues that it is “speciesist” to care more about the welfare of human beings than of other animals solely on the basis of species membership.

Week 3 (Feb 1): Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, “Universal Basic Rights for Animals”

Singer works within a utilitarian framework that’s based on maximizing well-being and minimizing suffering. Donaldson and Kymlicka articulate a contrasting defense of animals based on inalienable and universal rights.

Week 4 (Feb 8): Cora Diamond, “Eating Meat and Eating People”

Diamond thinks that arguments about animal welfare and animal rights are deeply misguided. If we’re going to make arguments in defense of animals, she says, we need to start from a sense of kinship that goes deeper than the language of welfare and rights.

Week 5 (Feb 15): Yi-Fu Tuan, “Animal Pets: Cruelty and Affection”

Tuan looks at our relationship with pets and argues that it is based not just on affection but also on a will to domination.

Week 6 (Feb 22): Carol J. Adams, “The Rape of Animals, the Butchering of Women”

In her book The Sexual Politics of Meat, Adams argues that there are close metaphorical links between the exploitation of animals for food and the sexual oppression of women.

Week 7 (Mar 1): Mary Midgley, “The Concept of Beastliness”

The folk image of animals as wild and unruly beasts doesn’t line up with biological reality. But this folk image has also informed a lot of thinking about human nature, argues Midgley. Thinking differently about animals entails thinking differently about ourselves.

Week 8 (Mar 8): Franz Kafka, “Report to an Academy”

In this short story by Kafka, a chimpanzee addresses a gathering of European scholars, telling the story of how he was captured in Africa and then trained “to reach the cultural level of an average European.” He also hints at what he had to sacrifice along the way.

Week 9 (Mar 15): J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, “The Philosophers and the Animals”

Coetzee’s novella recounts a visit made by a fictional novelist to a fictional American college where, instead of delivering a lecture about literature, she speaks about human cruelty to animals. In this first part, she claims that philosophers lack the tools for thinking empathetically about animal suffering.

Week 10 (Mar 22): J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, “The Poets and the Animals”

The second part of Coetzee’s novella, where we’ll also consider a brief response from Peter Singer. This part considers poetic attempts to think about animals and brings to a head the central character’s feelings of alienation from a society in which eating animals is taken for granted.