Animals and Nature: Cultural Myths, Cultural Realities

Animals and Nature: Cultural Myths, Cultural Realities

Rod Preece

Language: English

Pages: 335

ISBN: B01JXSRS5Y

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Western conceptions of objectivity and individuality have resulted in a readier appreciation of the worth of the animals and nature than has been recognized. This provocative book takes issue with the popular view that the Western cultural tradition, in contrast to Eastern and Aboriginal traditions, has encouraged attitudes of domination and exploitation towards nature, particularly animals. Preece argues that the Western tradition has much to commend it, and that descriptions of Aboriginal and Oriental orientations have often been misleadingly rosy, simplified and codified according to current fashionable concepts. Animals and Nature is the result of six years' intensive study into comparative religion, literature, philosophy, anthropology, mythology and animal welfare science.

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Genesis as "for the sake of authority, protection, and the gracious offices of benevolence and humanity."' In Agnes Grey (1849), Anne Bronte indicated that the doctrine, supplemented by other biblical texts, involves a significant human responsibility toward our fellow "sentient creatures." Of course, we should not exaggerate the respect accorded to non-humans, but neither should we make the Genesis story, or its interpretation in the Western tradition, something which is alien to it. If the

play the same member, and nearly the same action as in fighting; a lion, a tyger, a cat their paw; an ox his horns; a dog his teeth; a horse his heels: Yet they most carefully avoid harming their companion, even tho' they have nothing to fear from his resentment; which is an evident proof of the sense brutes have of each other's pain and pleasure.2" Having shown the similarities, Hume goes on to mention the commonly recognized differences that revolve around the rational and aesthetic life, each

it is through labour that one achieves one's entitlements. Indeed, it is not difficult to interpret Locke here as denying rights to the intellectuals, that is, "the Quarrelsome and Contentious"! "The Labour of his body, 101 102 Alienation from Nature and the work of his hands ... are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided, and left in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property."6

overcoming individual estrangement from the self and society - a transcendence seen as fulfilling the natural human potential that remained unsatisfied. For Marbod of Rennes, Aquinas, John of Salisbury, Hegel, Marx, and John Stuart Mill, the human was already alienated before the predominance of individual reason. Reason was seen as the faculty that could emancipate the oppressed human from the fetters of prior civilizations, from the limitations of our animal origins. Most in the Western

centuries of racial abuse, cultural vilification, and, perhaps worse, kindly xxv xxvi Introduction patronization, revenge is sweet. Yet although the revenge may be psychologically satisfying, and may stimulate our sense that justice is finally being served, it does not aid the understanding. It leads to self-justification rather than truth. Emotion, however justifiable, often blinds. Among my concerns in this book is to analyze the statements of Western intellectuals who, in the tradition of

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