Telling the Truth about Animals: Epistemology, Ethics, and Animal Minds in Melville, Darwin, Saunders, and London (2004)
Carswell, Lilian P. (Author)
Columbia University
Ferguson, Robert A.
Edition Details: Advisor: Ferguson, Robert A.
Physical Details: 252 pp.
Language: English
This project examines representations of animals as subjective beings in North American literature and in scientific writings of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. During this crucial period, evolutionary thinking encouraged the exploration of commonalities between human beings and other animals in a way that challenged long-held assumptions about human mental uniqueness and eroded traditional arguments for excluding nonhuman animals from ethical consideration. The dissertation traces two main lines of inquiry. The first is epistemological. What constitutes "real" or "true" knowledge of animals? How is this knowledge acquired, and how should it be represented and interpreted? The second is ethical. If the sensory, emotional, and cognitive lives of other animals do not differ in kind from their counterparts in human beings, then how should we treat them? Chapter One reads Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as a prescient expression of the epistemological and ethical questions Charles Darwin's work would engender. Moby-Dick raises the question of what it means to "know" other animals and points to a dawning cultural recognition of animals as beings with their own perspectives, interests, and experiential worlds. Chapter Two addresses Darwin's major statements on evolution and animal behavior, outlining his arguments about animal mind and suggesting that his approach to behavior as a language allowed for his inferences of animals' subjective states as the meaning behind behaviors. Chapter Three argues that Margaret Marshall Saunders' Beautiful Joe implicitly uses the cultural force of Darwinian evolution in outlining the ethical obligations that flow from sympathetic identification with other animals. Chapter Four reads Jack London's dog stories as a reworking of sentimental tropes in relation to Darwinian evolution and its implications for animal mind. The "nature fakers" controversy, which coincided with an increasing emphasis in literature and behavioral science on observable phenomena, frames the dissertation, highlighting the cultural significance of notions of biological reality and raising the questions underlying the writings considered here: what is true about animals, and what do these truths mean for our treatment of them?
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 65/05 (2004): 1778. UMI pub. no. 3133535.
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