Josephine Donovan

Animals, Mind, and Matter from Josephine Donovan is a wonderful reassessment of how our interactions with animals should be governed.

Animals are not simply sentient but have feelings and desires. Exactly the way humans do? No, but then I'm not sure any two humans think and feel exactly the same ways. Animals communicate with us, unfortunately we either can't fully understand them or, more often than not, claim plausible deniability about their feelings and ignore them. Donovan combines recent research that shows how much they think with ideas on how we can take their perspective into account in our interactions.

I recently read another book, Martha Nussbaum's Justice for Animals, that offers another alternative to the Cartesian perspective. Both books are well worth reading, they have some strong similarities while coming from slightly different perspectives. I would highly recommend both books, in conversation with them the reader will gain a better understanding of other animals and, frankly, a better understanding of humans as well. That last bit of insight will sometimes be disappointing, we far too often act in opposition to what we claim to believe.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (mer)

I'm deeply embarrassed to say that my own work with critical animal theory has just ignored or assumed CAT's debts to feminism. I'd be more embarrassed if I couldn't say the same thing about a lot of the CAT: [b:Corporeal Compassion|771951|Corporal Compassion Animal Ethics and Philosophy of Body|Ralph R. Acampora|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178217694s/771951.jpg|758004], [b:Zoographies|3223061|Zoographies The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida|Matthew Calarco|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51HHqo-LFvL._SL75_.jpg|3257138], Tyler, any number of the various anthologies on the subject (Killing Animals, [b:Representing Animals|1101942|Representing Animals|Nigel Rothfels|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1180995310s/1101942.jpg|1088833]), and, as Haraway points out in [b:When Species Meet|971320|When Species Meet (Posthumanities)|Donna J. Haraway|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179902188s/971320.jpg|956218], Derrida. Only Cary Wolfe, whose first chapter in [b:Animal Rites|226152|Animal Rites American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory|Cary Wolfe|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172869327s/226152.jpg|219048] engages with ecofeminists like Deborah Slicer, escapes the charge.

"Care" is throughout contrasted to the "rights & reason" model of Singer and Regan, which is, justifiably, accused of uncritically perpetuating subject/object distinctions (and all this implies) and of ignoring the ugly history of the category "reason." I'm in full sympathy with the "care" model, and am happy to add these thoughts to Levinas's infinite demands of the Other, Derrida's deep suspicions about reason, the law, and the 'good conscience,' as well as Leonard Lawlor's observations about the 'minimal violence' required to single something out for care. Given the training of the essayists here, it wouldn't really be fair to demand they know all this other work, but it is fair, I think, to take them to task for not showing any knowledge of cognitive science's advances in discovering the intelligence of emotion and (concomitantly) that a purely 'reasonable' brain is a pretty stupid thing.

Some essays (Marti Kheel's most of all) have aged badly; many would benefit from engagement with the intellectual traditions and thinkers who have ignored them (and of course vice versa: only Carol Adams engages with Derrida); some strike me as supererogatory (the first Donovan and Kelch essays); but many of the essays--Josephine Donovan "Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatment of Animals"; Thomas G. Kelch "The Role of the Rational and the Emotive in a Theory of Animal Rights"; Catherine MacKinnon "Of Mice and Men: A Fragment on Animal Rights"; Cathryn Bailey, "On the Backs of Animals: The Valorization of Reason in Contemporary Animal Ethics" [note the world of difference between "Rights" and "Ethics"!)--are essential reading for CAT and, being outside the abstruse rhetorical traditions of continental philosophy (for better and worse), could be very useful in a classroom setting.… (mer)

3346. Black Soil, by Josephine Donovan (read Sept 8, 2000) If you have ever driven into Granville, Iowa, you will see a sign : "Home of Black Soil". I presume most folk have no idea what the sign is about, but in 1930 this book was a best seller, and Granville claims it is laid in its locale. I have been wanting to read this since 1975, when I read a discussion of it in Roy W. Meyer's book, The Middle Western Farm Novel. This book runs the gamut of blizzards, grasshoppers, and like pioneer hardships. It is not a good book, but anyone who knows Granville--and I have been there a few times--should read it.… (mer)