Tracing an early rabbinic approach to the human, this article analyzes how the Tannaim of the Mishnah and Tosefta set the human side by side with other species, and embedded their account within broader considerations of reproduction , zoology and species hybridity. The human here emerges at the intersection of menstrual purity law and Temple sacrificial law in the tractates of Niddah and Bekhorot and is part of a reproductive biology that sought to determine the boundaries and overlaps between species. This rabbinic biology ought to be understood amid ancient conversations about what constitutes a proper member of a species, in terms of reproduction, resemblance and variation. The article shows how, even as it disavows genealogical links between humans and animals (and indeed across other species), rabbinic reproductive biology nonetheless implicates humans among and as animals.

In this paper I argue against various realist conceptions of species, and defend species concepts based on similarities.

While human beings are without any doubt orders of magnitude removed from animals in the degree of development, no difference in degree alone can constitute a difference in kind. The formalization of this phenomenological inability to define the demarcation of species is not only of utmost highest importance with respect to the conception of human dignity but also to the ethical classification of the human ability to design hybrid-creatures. The heuristic principle of inability motivates an ontological consideration suggesting an unambiguous species-barrier defined by a generic and specific analysis of the human incarnation.

This paper compares recent anthropological accounts of animist and perspectivist ontologies with evolutionary explanations of animal behaviour in contemporary behavioural ecology. It argues that some unexpected echoes between these two very different ways of encountering non-humans raise a set of fascinating issues both ethnographic and theoretical. On the ethnographic side, thinking of behavioural ecology as akin to a 'naturalist perspectivism' illuminates some of the complex ways in which the discipline deals with worries about anthropomorphic projection. On the theoretical side, the comparison raises some questions about the ease with which us/them contrasts associated with the recent 'ontological turn' in anthropology find themselves echoing contrasts internal to western philosophical and scientific debate. The resulting problem of mirroring (the concern that 'others' may be called upon to play the role of an anti-'us', rather than encountered on their own terms) is in turn considered as an analogue of the scientific problem of 'anthropomorphism', and some potential responses to both are considered.

Critical reading of the human-animal relation in the moral philosophies of Taylor and MacIntyre

The provocation of my chapter is to argue that modern discursive (and hence ideological) normativities that divide human from animal occlude alternative imaginings of porosity between orders of being. These porosities persist in modernity and postmodernity, but often in the realm of the speculative or the fantastic. Given recent developments in the biological and cognitive sciences that contribute to the de-substantialization of the dividing line, it is instructive to explore some pre-and early modern figurations of being that likewise trouble species boundaries (much as Darwin did), avant la lettre. In its effort to distinguish the human from the divine, early modern philosophy laboriously forged hierarchies of difference; in my chapter I examine one of them as illustrative of early humanisms's efforts to establish human exceptionalism, Pico della Mirandola's On the Dignity of Man (1496). However, a lively alternative philosophical tradition persists alongside, best exemplified by Montaigne's "Apology for Raymond Sebond" (1580) and imaginative rewritings of the popular Circe myth, which staged debates about the relative desirability of human and animalian states of being and inflected such debates with gender politics as well. Returning to notions of figural historiography I have developed elsewhere, I read passages from a selection of early modern imaginative texts that either articulate a reciprocity between species, or figure their porosity, or fail to champion human exceptionalism in their figurations. I look for alternative, "speculative" models of being that challenge what we have come to understand in the West as normative species divides. In so doing, the chapter also hopes to show the degree to which gender and race are deeply and inextricably entangled in species, and to suggest that past speculative figurations might illumine present culturalist conceptualizations of the species divide.

Various cases of conjoined twinning have been presented as problems for the animalist view that we are animals. In some actual and possible cases of human dicephalus that have been discussed in the literature, it is arguable that there are two persons but only one human animal. It is also tempting to believe that there are two persons and one animal in possible instances of craniopagus parasiticus that have been described. Here it is argued that the animalist can admit that these are cases in which human persons are not animals, without forfeiting the title “animalist.” It is also shown that this is not only an option but also a well-motivated and plausible option for the animalist. Seeing this requires getting clear on what the word “we” should be thought to include in the animalist's claim that we are animals. Here animalism is defended against twinning objections by figuring out how to view the scope of the animalist's identity claim.