What is an Animal?

A unique interdisciplinary challenge to assumptions about animals and animality deeply embedded in our own ways of thought, exposing sensitive and largely unexplored aspects of the understanding of our common humanity.

This book offers a unique interdisciplinary challenge to assumptions about animals and animality deeply embedded in our own ways of thought, and at the same time exposes highly sensitive and largely unexplored aspects of the understanding of our common humanity.

Chapter 1 Introduction, Tim Ingold; Chapter 2 Is humanity a natural kind?, Stephen R. L. Clark; Chapter 3 Beasts, brutes and monsters, Mary Midgley; Chapter 4 Animality, humanity, morality, society, Richard Tapper; Chapter 5 'Animal' in biological and semiotic perspective, Thomas A. Sebeok; Chapter 6 Animals attitudes to people, Jennie Coy; Chapter 7 The animal in the study of humanity, Tim Ingold; Chapter 8 Organisms and minds: the dialectics of the animal-human interface in biology, Brian Goodwin; Chapter 9 The affordances of the animate environment: social science from the ecological point of view, Edward S. Reed; Chapter 10 Becoming human, our links with our past, Nancy Makepeace Tanner; Chapter 11 Human animality, the mental imagery of fear, and religiosity, Balaji Mundkur;