Amy Gutmann

I love Coetzee's writing and especially his character Elizabeth Costello, so re-reading her two lectures 'The Philosophers and Animals' and 'The Poets and Animals' was of course a pleasure. If I am not mistaken, this version has annotations which the original Elizabeth Costello book didn't have so it was good to go chase some links and discover even more on this topic.
I like the idea of a literary debate and all the commentaries are interesting. I particularly enjoyed the literary theorist Marjorie Garber's writing and of course Barbara Smuts' 'from the heart' experience of befriending animals.… (més)

Maybe the fourth star is for agreement, nothing else. The whole concept of giving this kind of lecture strikes me as wonderfully perverse, though, and the piece radiates a kind of intensity. Garber's claim that the subject here isn't simply interspecies relations seems on-point as well: beyond the commentary on the academic scene (the jousting at dinner, the university "types"—the rancorous, employmentally-challenged philosopher of mind, the well-meaning but ineffectual natural scientist...), questions of language and its capabilities, of sympathy and communication, even between humans, find cutting expression. "He inhales the smell of cold cream, of old flesh. 'There, there,' he whispers in her ear. 'There, there. It will soon be over.'" (The old woman out of place in both the family and the academy, a being unable to communicate with her son, the only consolation some vague "end"—yikes!)

(My clear lack of disinterestedness...)

Peter Singer's Peter Singer: "The value that is lost when something is emptied depends on what was there when it was full, and there is more to human existence than there is to bat existence." After all, humans can use human languages, plan for the future, manipulate complicated conceptual systems, in short, do the things that many humans do, and how could the existence of a being that can't do the things that many humans can be as valuable or rich as a human's?

Responses by Wendy Doniger and Barbara Smuts (especially the latter) strike me as well-written...

Costello's comparison between Ramanujan and Red Peter and Red Sally seems... well, unfortunate.… (més)