The special issue, titled “Philosophy of Animality: Animals as Strangers” and co-edited by Michaela Fišerová, Maria Cristina Clorinda Vendra, and Veronika Konrádová, brings together an international community of thinkers working across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy. In their moral and aesthetic reflections, philosophers have often placed animals in an ambiguous space between outsiders and insiders within the “human” world.[1] By critically revisiting how philosophy has addressed the problem of strangeness in human-animal relations, this special issue invites us to question several “xenophobic” attitudes embedded in philosophical concepts and metaphors associated with animals, including the beast, the pest, or the threat. The status of the enemy is particularly evident in representations of so-called invasive species, whose agency challenges human manipulation and control. Focusing on the aesthetic imaginings and ethical justifications that shape how humans cohabit with animals, this collection of articles addresses a central question: why do animals appear in philosophy as strangers? To this end, this special issue organises different philosophical conceptualisations of animality along a three-field spectrum of openness to symbiotic interspecies cohabitation, ranging from contempt and vigilance through inspiring neighbourhood to respectful companionship. [1] Because the theoretical approaches and methodologies adopted across the articles in this special issue vary, terminology has not been standardized. The authors intentionally employ both “animals” and “non-human animals,” according to their respective theoretical frameworks, contexts, and conceptual emphases.
The book The Courage to Say No. Forms of Voluntary Submission, published by Ciprian Mihali, proposes a double challenge from the beginning: first, the courage to say no, not only to the permanent requirements of adaptation, alignment and uniformity imposed by social norms and institutions, but also to the tacit consent of the subject who, internalizing imperatives regarding continuous "optimization" and "self-reinvention", ends up dominating his own person. Through this voluntary submission, through self-discipline, adapted individuals are "produced", with a stable and performing life, but most often devoid of wonder and desire in search of a meaning of their own existence. But, "why the courage to say no, and not 'will', 'desire', 'power' etc.?" (p.38) asks the author. And what kind of courage is it? A heroic, exceptional, spectacular virtue or simply a negative gesture? For Ciprian Mihali, courage is a form of suspension of submission to the established order; it is the ability to stop consenting, even when the pressure of external authority or our own states of fear, habit, or convenience indicates the direction of conformity. "To be brave is to take risks" (p.39), the author states, together with Michel Foucault, for whom the decision of the parresian to tell the truth and to assume it implies the "risk of uncertainty" and "unpredictable consequences", at the moment of interruption of a known, safe, and above all comfortable course.
This article reads Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth as a posthumanist allegory of divine animality. It argues that Gus, an antlered child who is human, animal, clone, pharmakon, and god, is not merely a human–deer hybrid, but the pharmakon of the human species: the being through whom humanity seeks a cure and encounters its own extinction. Drawing on Derrida, Haraway, and Wolfe, the article shows how Sweet Tooth links plague, cloning, colonial violence, and species hierarchy. It then places Gus in dialogue with Andrej Dúbravský’s horned male nudes and Zone Blanche/ Black Spot, reading them as three modes of antlering: narrative-pharmacological, painterly-theophanic, and territorial-ecological.
János Apáczai Csere was the greatest Hungarian pedagogue, writer, translator, author of textbooks, theologian, and philosopher of seventeenth-century Transylvania, a distinguished representative of Cartesian thought, an eminent figure of the Transylvanian Puritan movement, the first Hungarian encyclopaedist, and the first Hungarian synthesiser of the sciences. Apáczai was the most significant representative of the peregrini who had attended Western universities; he had his principal work, the Magyar Encyclopaedia, printed in Utrecht (in 1655 with the date 1653), a Hungarian-language book intended for school use that summarised the entirety of the scholarship of his age. With him the period in which Hungarian philosophical texts were written exclusively in Latin came to an end, and the period of cultivating philosophy in the Hungarian language commenced. He is likewise associated with the first important Hungarian-language reception of one of the greatest philosophers of the age, René Descartes, who, according to the Transylvanian scholar, was “the reformer of all philosophy”, “the pride of the century”.[1] The most significant Hungarian thinker of the period, the first truly modern Hungarian philosopher, was János Apáczai Csere. [1] With the appearance of Bacon, Spinoza, and Descartes, seventeenth-century European philosophical development set out on a radically new path, that of empiricism and rationalism. In the spread of the new ideas in Hungary, the presence of the Czech scholar Comenius also played an important preparatory role; he was a representative of encyclopaedism, a fashionable trend of the age that soon came to dominate Protestant intellectual life. This current regarded the construction of a universal system of knowledge as its aim. The new outlook found adherents among the professors of the Lutheran College of Eperjes. Its principal representative, János Bayer, a follower of Bacon’s experiential philosophy, regarded the world as an integral whole composed of the elements of matter, light, and spirit, and considered the task of the thinker to be the discovery of the key to universal knowledge that illuminates everything. Like Bacon, he too hoped that the logical instrument for understanding the world was induction, the articulation of general laws derived from the examination of every individual case. (His pupil, Izsák Czabán, first in Wittenberg and then in Eperjes, already represented the fashionable materialist atomism of the period, frequently referring to the most important source of his theory, Gassendi’s atomism.) While Lutheran scholarship of this period oriented itself towards Bacon (and Gassendi), the Reformed tradition turned towards Descartes. Several professors in Debrecen fell under suspicion of Cartesianism. A characteristic representative of this era was Miklós Apáti (1662–1724), who, in his work on moral philosophy – alongside his emphasis on the freedom of inquiry and of the will – expressed enthusiasm for the mathematical method: he maintained that “God is the supreme mathematician”. Another thinker of the same period was János Pósaházi (1628–1686). Alongside his activities as polemicist and theologian – even while disputing Descartes’s views – he nonetheless confirmed Descartes, as well as other natural philosophers of the age, in his reflections on matter and the nature of motion.
The aim of this article is to offer a phenomenological reconsideration of the meat paradox through the lens of compassion toward animals. Rather than approaching the paradox primarily as a cognitive-affective conflict or a problem of moral inconsistency, the analysis examines the experiential structures through which it is constituted and lived. It begins with the experiences of hunger and eating, showing how animals may acquire contrasting significance as vulnerable living beings eliciting compassion and as sources of nourishment. The analysis then turns to corporeal proximity and distance, visibility and concealment, examining how these relations may shape, without determining, the emergence and exercise of compassion. Particular attention is given to the limits of compassionate responsiveness, from its possible anesthetization through distance and concealment to the affective strain associated with repeated exposure to animal suffering. Finally, the article considers emerging forms of meat production, arguing that the future of the meat paradox does not involve its resolution or disappearance, but its reconfiguration alongside changing relations between animals, food, and compassion.
