On the Phenomenological Basis of the Distinction between “Higher ” and “Lower ” Animals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing upon Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological constitution of the Other through Einfühlung, I argue that the hierarchical distinction between higher and lower animals—which has been dismissed by Heidegger for being anthropocentric— must not be conceived as an objective distinction between “primitive ” animals and “more evolved ” ones, but rather corresponds to a phenomenological distinction between familiar and unfamiliar animals. For man, there can only be man. Animals, for Husserl, are variants of humanity. —Merleau-Ponty, La nature Introductory Remarks Our conception and treatment of animals is deeply influenced by a common distinction between “lower ” and “higher ” animals.1 Since this hierarchical distinction is obviously anthropocentric—that is, made in relation to the kind of life that is ours—many contemporary discourses in philosophy, ethics, and critical animal studies argue we should abandon distinctions between kinds of animal altogether. This popular reflex in our “antispecist ” times is echoed in Heidegger’s analysis of animal life, in which he refuses to interpret animal behaviors through Einfühlung to avoid both anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. However, I will argue this strategy closes from the start all possibility 1. I wish to thank David Morris and Kim Maclaren for organizing the Inter-University Workshop on Animality (Ryerson University, Toronto, April 2011) where I presented an abridged version of this paper, and Ted Toadvine for his inspiring lectures as our guest speaker. My gratitude also goes to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and to Vincent Duhamel for helping me rehearse my ideas.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".