Animals and Animism in Modern European Thought

Undergraduate / Graduate

Once one of the most hackneyed notions in the history of ideas, the concept of animism has made a striking return in a variety of contemporary debates. This course, a discussion-based seminar and a thematic study in intellectual history, examines this once reviled and now revived philosophy of nature. Animist perceptions of a living earth, which have been around since time immemorial, raise pivotal questions about the nature of the natural world, the nature of nonhuman animals, and the place of humans in nature. We will read the key animistic ideas of major European intellectuals such as James Frazer, Sigmund Freud, D. H. Lawrence, Georges Bataille, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. This course offers a historical approach to the ideas of those who wrote about animals and animism from anthropological, psychological, philosophical, and literary perspectives. More specifically the course asks whether animistic philosophies of nature can help us to develop a healthier and more ethical relationship to the other animals and the environment-or, at the very least, help us to stop devouring and destroying them at such a cataclysmic rate.