•  108
    Descartes on the Moral Status of Animals
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 80 (3): 268-291. 1998.
    Conventional wisdom has long maintained that Descartes considered animals to be unfeeling machines with no capacity for perceptual states like pain, and that Descartes's mechanistic view of animals was the basis for his claim that we owe animals no moral obligations. Several recent commentators have sought to repudiate this conventional wisdom, either by denying that Descartes had a purely mechanistic conception of animal perception or by attempting to argue that Descartes allowed for the possib…Read more
  •  29
    _Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents_ is the first-ever comprehensive examination of views of animals in the history of Western philosophy, from Homeric Greece to the twentieth century. In recent decades, increased interest in this area has been accompanied by scholars’ willingness to conceive of animal experience in terms of human mental capacities: consciousness, self-awareness, intention, deliberation, and in some instances, at least limited moral agency. This conception has been facilitated…Read more
  •  29
    The past several generations of scholarship on Rembrandt's “Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp” have suffered from the anxiety of influence exercised by the influential interpretations of William Heckscher and William Schupbach. Schupbach's interpretation in particular has guided interpretation of the painting in the past generation and has given rise to a fundamental misunderstanding of the painting and its cultural significance. Schupbach and those whom he has influenced have failed to recogn…Read more
  •  20
    Rowlands on animal morality (review)
    The Philosophers' Magazine 65 115-118. 2014.
  •  19
    Gary Steiner argues that ethologists and philosophers in the analytic and continental traditions have largely failed to advance an adequate explanation of animal behavior.
  •  16
    Response to Commentators
    PhaenEx 8 (2): 308. 2013.
    Author of Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
  •  16
    Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism
    Columbia University Press. 2013.
    In Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism, Gary Steiner illuminates postmodernism's inability to produce viable ethical and political principles.
  •  14
    Kant and Animals ed. by John J. Callanan and Lucy Allais (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 59 (3): 517-519. 2021.
    A well-known Kant scholar once said to me, "You know, I love to study Kant because I think he's right about everything!" While it may be unlikely that that or any other Kant scholar really believes that Kant was "right about everything," the statement reminds us that, roughly speaking, there are two kinds of philosopher: those who are fully invested in vindicating as much of Kant's thought as humanly possible, and those who are concerned that Kant's thought is in many respects the culmination of…Read more
  •  5
    Rowlands on animal morality (review)
    The Philosophers' Magazine 65 115-118. 2014.
  •  4
    Animals: A History ed. by Peter Adamson, and G. Fay Edwards (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 57 (3): 566-567. 2019.
    Recent years have seen a proliferation of publications on the status of nonhuman animals in philosophy, some of them single-authored monographs and quite a few others taking the form of anthologies. Anthologies always present the reader with challenges, and in the case of this volume, the challenges are significant. While it is admirable that the editors have brought together essays on a variety of important thinkers and topics related to animals in the history of philosophy, the essays in this …Read more