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Lecturer(s)
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Fišerová Michaela, doc. Mgr. Ph.D.
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Course content
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1. Definition of concepts of the human and the animal, and its role in the Western philosophical thinking. Interdisciplinary overlapings: ethics/politics and aesthetics/poetics of animality. 2. Antiquity and Aristotle´s conception of human and animal soul 3. Medieval and Rennaissance bestiaries: animal as a symbol of the (non)human 4. Descartes, Condillac and discussion on animal mind in the Enlightment 5. Schelling and Herder: mystic nature and animal in Romantism 6. Bentham and Singer: utilitarian care for animal suffering 7. Deleuze, Guattari on creativity and becoming-animal 8. Merlerau-Ponty, Burgatová and problematic phenomenology of animal 9. Derrida, Fonteney and deconstruction of zoopoetics 10. Lorenz´s etics of ethology 11. Berger and disursive ways of seeing of animality 12. Harraway and overcoming of specieism 13. Conclusion
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Learning activities and teaching methods
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unspecified, unspecified, unspecified, unspecified
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Learning outcomes
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The subject introduces into the Western tradition of philosophical understanding of concepts of the human and the animal. Its goal is to introduce to reading of the most influential philosophical texts on this topic from the double perspective of ethico-political and aesthetico-poetical approaches. Each of these lines of philosophical thinking allows another understading and opens to several views in the given perspective. The goal of reading of these texts is to distinguishand compare them to suggest possible areas of their application on examples of historical and contemporary dealing with animals.
The student will get orientation in the Western metaphysical thinking on the level of philosophical understanding of concepts of the human and the animal. Via reading of a representative selection of texts from the fields of ethics and aesthetics, the student will see mutual codependence in contrast definiotions of these concepts. Based on comparison of individual texts, the student will uncover various philosophical intentions and presuppositions that condition the conception of differences and similarities between animality and humanity. The student will understand historical evolution of the Western philosophical tradition of thinking about the human and the animal, the cultural and the natural. This knowledge will help him evaluate the extent of possible application of the older and newer approaches to the problems of evolution, concurrence, symbiosis, and protection of scpecies in the context of environmental questions of the contemporary world.
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Prerequisites
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reading in English
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Assessment methods and criteria
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unspecified
Writing and presentation of seminar work on a chosen topic in the corresponding seminar lesson. The student is expected to attend lectures and actively join seminar discussions, as well as to work carefully with the primary and secondary sources of philosophical bibliography.
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Recommended literature
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