Abstract
The introduction presents the rationale of the volume, arguing for a specificity in the way in which the Italian tradition—and contemporary Italian philosophy in particular—approached the animal question and which from the perspective of the Anglo-American “orthodoxy” (e.g., in the field of Animal studies) appears as heterodox. After a brief historical overview of modern animal protection movements in Italy, we explore the argument that Italian philosophy as such presents a specific relation to its “outside”: life. We argue therefore that this peculiar relation caused Italian philosophy to bypass Cartesianism—and the logocentrism that, with it, marked the whole of modern Western philosophy—and to approach the animal question in a very specific and original (and therefore also heterodox) way.
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Notes
- 1.
Historian Harriet Ritvo (1987: 126ff), however, has shown long ago that this long-standing bias is baseless and a cultural and nationalist prejudice: “as early as the 1830s, despite the circumambient evidence to the contrary, the English humane movement had begun to claim kindness to animals as a native trait and to associate cruelty to animals with foreigners, especially those from southern, Catholic countries” (127).
- 2.
- 3.
The first translation appeared in 1987 published by the Antivivisection League (LAV ), followed by the second one in 1991 with a wide circulation by the major publisher Mondadori.
- 4.
It is impossible to translate animalismo and animalista into English without recurring to inaccurate periphrases such as “animal right or animal protection activism/activist.” The false friend “animalism” in English refers instead to animal qualities or behaviors, particularly emphasizing their physicality or instinctuality in contraposition to (human) spiritual, moral, or intellectual qualities.
- 5.
- 6.
Negri too remarks the weakness of Italian philosophy in the face of popes (and/as bosses and dictators)!
- 7.
This thesis has since been also adopted by others: cf., for example, Campbell and Size (2013: 4).
- 8.
“Never Cartesian” and “never Kantian” could amount to: Italian philosophy has never been modern, to quote Bruno Latour .
- 9.
Cf. also Gentili (2012: 7ff).
- 10.
For a new analysis of this point, cf. Cimatti (2018).
- 11.
We would like to thank Dave Mesing, who proofread a number of chapters.
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Cimatti, F., Salzani, C. (2020). Introduction: The Italian Animal—A Heterodox Tradition. In: Cimatti, F., Salzani, C. (eds) Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47507-9_1
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