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Subjectivity: What, Whose and Why?

Author(s): Krzysztof Skonieczny
Subject(s): History of Philosophy, Ethics / Practical Philosophy
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: subjectivity; subject; animal; attribution; ethics
Summary/Abstract: The chapter analyses the problem of animal subjectivity in a number of philosophical theories. It starts by describing the Cartesian understanding of the subject, paradigmatic for Modernity, which is rational, active, self-sufficient and closed – as well as human and not animal. Next, it shows how this vision of the subject was put into question in the 19th and 20th centuries by the advent of evolutionary science and a new historical understanding of the human. It then shows how those criticisms influence our understanding of the relationship between the human and the animal, pointing to the possibility of attributing subjectivity to the animal. The chapter ends with a discussion of the idea that it is perhaps indeed the act of attribution that is the most important for our understanding of human and animal subjectivity.

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