Simondon is a secret password among certain discussions within philosophy today. As a philosopher of technology, Simondon’s work has a place at the forefront of current thinking in media, technology, psychology, and philosophy with complex accounts of man’s relationship to technology and the realm that continues to form itself via this tension between man and his technical universe. In this introduction to Simondon’s oeuvre, the reader has access to the grounding of one of the most fundamental and critical questions that has been the focus of philosophy for millennia: the relationship between man and animal.

Philosophy reads humanity against animality, arguing that "man" is man because he is separate from beast. Deftly challenging this position, Kelly Oliver proves that, in fact, it is the animal that teaches us to be human. Through their sex, their habits, and our perception of their purpose, animals show us how not to be them. This kinship plays out in a number of ways. We sacrifice animals to establish human kinship, but without the animal, the bonds of "brotherhood" fall apart. Either kinship with animals is possible or kinship with humans is impossible. Philosophy holds that humans and animals are distinct, but in defending this position, the discipline depends on a discourse that relies on the animal for its very definition of the human. Through these and other examples, Oliver does more than just establish an animal ethics. She transforms ethics by showing how its very origin is dependent upon the animal. Examining for the first time the treatment of the animal in the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Agamben, Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva, among others, Animal Lessons argues that the animal bites back, thereby reopening the question of the animal for philosophy.

While observing exotic animal trainers for her acclaimed book Kicked, Bitten, and Scratched, journalist Amy Sutherland had an epiphany: What if she used these training techniques with the human animals in her own life–namely her dear husband, Scott? In this lively and perceptive book, Sutherland tells how she took the trainers’ lessons home. The next time her forgetful husband stomped through the house in search of his mislaid car keys, she asked herself, “What would a dolphin trainer do?” The answer was: nothing. Trainers reward the behavior they want and, just as important, ignore the behavior they don’t. Rather than appease her mate’s rising temper by joining in the search, or fuel his temper by nagging him to keep better track of his things in the first place, Sutherland kept her mouth shut and her eyes on the dishes she was washing. In short order, Scott found his keys and regained his cool. “I felt like I should throw him a mackerel,” she writes. In time, as she put more training principles into action, she noticed that she became more optimistic and less judgmental, and their twelve-year marriage was better than ever. What started as a goofy experiment had such good results that Sutherland began using the training techniques with all the people in her life, including her mother, her friends, her students, even the clerk at the post office. In the end, the biggest lesson she learned is that the only animal you can truly change is yourself. Full of fun facts, fascinating insights, hilarious anecdotes, and practical tips, What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage describes Sutherland’s Alice-in-Wonderland experience of stumbling into a world where cheetahs walk nicely on leashes and elephants paint with watercolors, and of leaving a new, improved Homo sapiens.

The Creature is an invitation to follow the mechanics between power and pain, which begets the creature. Creatures confront power in, and through, conjunctures of radical contingency. The casual use of power is an exercise in distraction. It is an abiding conundrum that those who endure affliction also exert it as a force over other living bodies in equal measure-not as acts of vengeance or bad faith, but through deeds of forgetful randomness. To ensure social indemnity and security, creatures exercise force over kindred embodiments through a process of collective mimicry. In the bargain, creatures begin to disfigure and distort each other. The line between mutual slaughter and mutual embrace begins to blur. Each transgresses its own soul. At other times, power is an opaque, magisterial and disdainful style of conveyance. It reveals itself out of nowhere. But the steadfast creature is as resilient as it is vulnerable. The more it endures, the greater its perdurance. Perduring creatures may sometimes gain a second sight, forged out of a sense of lyricality, love and abdication. But is abdication, or taking refuge in the wondrous, sufficient to release all creatures from the fatal loop of power and pain? Or will they have to slowly shed creaturely affliction by a rigorous process of decreation? Sifting through the writings of Giambattista Vico, Niccolò Machiavelli, Gabriel Tarde, Miguel de Unamuno, Jibanananda Das, Lev Shestov, Raymond Geuss, Jean Starobinski, Ernst Bloch, Simone Weil, Simon Critchley, Sarah Kane and others, this volume explores the creaturely predicament and its possibilities of freedom. The five chapters in Book I lay down fundamental questions for the creaturely condition: the question of mimicry, the relationship between taking initiative and being hounded, the bridge between senses and destitution, and the vehemence of radical contingency. Book II posits the question of skepticism, fideism and their connection to resilience and generosity in creatures. Book III is entirely devoted to various ways of conceiving the aesthetic: through the tragic, the epiphanic, the catastrophic and through militant material eruptions. Book II and III essentially delve into the sites of freedom that lurk within the condition of the creaturely. Book IV is constituted of a single chapter on the subject of decreation; it grapples with questions of attention, anonymity and abdication.

The author of "Animals in Translation" employs her own experience with autism and her background as an animal scientist to show how to give animals the best and happiest life.

"In loving yet unsentimental prose, Sy Montgomery captures the richness that animals bring to the human experience. Sometimes it takes a too-smart-for-his-own-good pig to open our eyes to what most matters in life.” —John Grogan, author of Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog A naturalist who spent months at a time living on her own among wild creatures in remote jungles, Sy Montgomery had always felt more comfortable with animals than with people. So she gladly opened her heart to a sick piglet who had been crowded away from nourishing meals by his stronger siblings. Yet Sy had no inkling that this piglet, later named Christopher Hogwood, would not only survive but flourish—and she soon found herself engaged with her small-town community in ways she had never dreamed possible. Unexpectedly, Christopher provided this peripatetic traveler with something she had sought all her life: an anchor (eventually weighing 750 pounds) to family and home. The Good Good Pig celebrates Christopher Hogwood in all his glory, from his inauspicious infancy to hog heaven in rural New Hampshire, where his boundless zest for life and his large, loving heart made him absolute monarch over a (mostly) peaceable kingdom. At first, his domain included only Sy’s cosseted hens and her beautiful border collie, Tess. Then the neighbors began fetching Christopher home from his unauthorized jaunts, the little girls next door started giving him warm, soapy baths, and the villagers brought him delicious leftovers. His intelligence and fame increased along with his girth. He was featured in USA Today and on several National Public Radio environmental programs. On election day, some voters even wrote in Christopher’s name on their ballots. But as this enchanting book describes, Christopher Hogwood’s influence extended far beyond celebrity; for he was, as a friend said, a great big Buddha master. Sy reveals what she and others learned from this generous soul who just so happened to be a pig—lessons about self-acceptance, the meaning of family, the value of community, and the pleasures of the sweet green Earth. The Good Good Pig provides proof that with love, almost anything is possible.

To observe a dog's guilty look. to witness a gorilla's self-sacrifice for a wounded mate, to watch an elephant herd's communal effort on behalf of a stranded calf--to catch animals in certain acts is to wonder what moves them. Might there he a code of ethics in the animal kingdom? Must an animal be human to he humane? In this provocative book, a renowned scientist takes on those who have declared ethics uniquely human Making a compelling case for a morality grounded in biology, he shows how ethical behavior is as much a matter of evolution as any other trait, in humans and animals alike. World famous for his brilliant descriptions of Machiavellian power plays among chimpanzees-the nastier side of animal life--Frans de Waal here contends that animals have a nice side as well. Making his case through vivid anecdotes drawn from his work with apes and monkeys and holstered by the intriguing, voluminous data from his and others' ongoing research, de Waal shows us that many of the building blocks of morality are natural: they can he observed in other animals. Through his eyes, we see how not just primates but all kinds of animals, from marine mammals to dogs, respond to social rules, help each other, share food, resolve conflict to mutual satisfaction, even develop a crude sense of justice and fairness. Natural selection may be harsh, but it has produced highly successful species that survive through cooperation and mutual assistance. De Waal identifies this paradox as the key to an evolutionary account of morality, and demonstrates that human morality could never have developed without the foundation of fellow feeling our species shares with other animals. As his work makes clear, a morality grounded in biology leads to an entirely different conception of what it means to he human--and humane.