IsisCB Explore

Thesis ID: CBB001562113

Telling the Truth about Animals: Epistemology, Ethics, and Animal Minds in Melville, Darwin, Saunders, and London (2004)

Columbia University
Ferguson, Robert A.

Publication Date: 2004
Edition Details: Advisor: Ferguson, Robert A.
Physical Details: 252 pp.
Language: English

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Science and literature Epistemology Animals Ethics 19th century 20th century, early Darwin, Charles Robert London, Jack Melville, Herman Saunders, Margaret Marshall

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?

...More

Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 65/05 (2004): 1778. UMI pub. no. 3133535.

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001562113/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Thesis Gravitte, Kristen Barber; (2013)
Animal Ethics and Ethical Animals: American Literature and Science, 1849--1906 (/isis/citation/CBB001567431/)

Thesis Callaway, David R.; (2000)
Melville in the Age of Darwin and Paley: Science in Typee, Mardi, Moby Dick, and Clarel (/isis/citation/CBB001562695/)

Book Cuddy, Lois A.; Roche, Claire M.; (2003)
Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 1880-1940: Essays on Ideological Conflict and Complicity (/isis/citation/CBB000500826/)

Book Halliday, Sam; (2007)
Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James:Thinking and Writing Electricity (/isis/citation/CBB000831315/)

Thesis Nichols, Rachael L.; (2010)
The Human Animal: Tangles in Science and Literature, 1870--1920 (/isis/citation/CBB001567211/)

Thesis Roedell, Christopher Andrew; (2005)
The Beasts that Perish: The Problem of Evil and the Contemplation of theAnimal Kingdom in English Thought, c. 1660--1839 (/isis/citation/CBB001561579/)

Book Dawson, Gowan; (2007)
Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (/isis/citation/CBB000774026/)

Thesis Badia, Lynn Ann; (2014)
A Universe of Forces: Energy in Early Twentieth-Century Theory and Literature (/isis/citation/CBB001567589/)

Article Gattinara, Enrico Castelli; (2011)
Le Rôle Civique du Rationalisme Expérimental Chez Federigo Enriques (/isis/citation/CBB001252113/)

Thesis Elshtain, Eric P.; (2010)
Fact, Verses, Science: Objective Poetry and Scientific Speculation in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charles Darwin (/isis/citation/CBB001562759/)

Thesis Bruni, John P.; (2003)
Making the Fittest Culture: Social Darwinism and American Naturalist Writing at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (/isis/citation/CBB001560857/)

Book Ewa Barbara Luczak; (2015)
Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination: Heredity Rules in the Twentieth Century (/isis/citation/CBB078848577/)

Book Richard J. King; (2019)
Ahab's Rolling Sea: A Natural History of "Moby-Dick" (/isis/citation/CBB326526534/)

Thesis Worden, Joel Daniel; (2005)
The Galapagos in American Consciousness: American Fiction Writers' Responses to Darwinism (/isis/citation/CBB001560799/)

Article Kistner, Kelly; (2013)
“A Word Factory Was Wanted”: Organizational Objectivity in the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (/isis/citation/CBB001320556/)

Book Gilmore, Paul; (2009)
Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (/isis/citation/CBB001020720/)

Article Hoare, Philip; (2013)
Cetology: How Science Inspired Moby-Dick (/isis/citation/CBB001320419/)

Book Harrison, Henry Leslie; (2007)
The Temple and the Forum: The American Museum and Cultural Authority in Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, and Whitman (/isis/citation/CBB001035575/)

Thesis Cisco, Michael; (2004)
Supernatural Embarrassment: The Polemic between Science and the Supernatural in the Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville (/isis/citation/CBB001562039/)

Thesis Meredith Farmer; (2016)
Melville's Ontology (/isis/citation/CBB071009731/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}