Description
The earliest representation of an animal by a human artist, found in a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia, is over 35,000 years old. Since then, animality has been bound up in human making processes, including the Greeks’ war machine at Troy, the heraldry system of feudal Europe, the animal automata of the Renaissance, and, most recently, biorobotic devices that look and move like nonhuman species. How humans think about animals matters; and in this course we will cover the history of thinking about animals from Descartes to the present, in an effort to think about whether and how animals should be incorporated in making. As such, this is partly a history of philosophy course, and partly an ethics course.