Etyczne spojrzenie na cierpienie zwierząt w filozofii Mariana Zdziechowskiego
The Ethical View of Animal Suffering in the Philosophy of Marian Zdziechowski

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on the depiction of animal suffering in early 20th century book-long essays by non-anthropocentric philosopher Marian Zdziechowski. His works: Pesymizm, romantyzm a podstawy chrześcijaństwa [Pessimism, Romanticism and the Foundations of Christianity] (1992), O okrucieństwie [On Cruelty] (1996) and W obliczu końca [Facing the End] (1999) are discussed in three subsequent sections and my methodological approach is close reading. Zdziechowski’s views on the animal question are placed in the context of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy and the Christian religion, of which this writer was both an adherent and a critic. The final section considers contemporary theories of ethics towards animals in which some echoes of Zdziechowski’s thought can be found. In particular, Richard Ryder’s speciesism and painism, as well as the contemporary theory describing the mechanisms of the transmission of violence, testify that Zdziechowski’s intuitions anticipated the Anthropocene thought as early as the 1920s and 1930s.

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