Psychology Commons^™

The Metaphysics Of Anthropocentrism: A Review Of Paul Ehrenfeld's "The Arrogance Of Humanism" And Mary Midgley's "Beast And Man", Bernard E. Rollin

Attitudes Towards Animals Collection

Our attitudes and behavior toward nature and toward other forms of life are clearly in the forefront of contemporary ethical concern. It thus becomes necessary to examine critically the metaphysics which has traditionally grounded these attitudes. Unquestionably, the key feature of the dominant underlying conceptual scheme has been the positing of a clear-cut dichotomy between man and the natural world. For most of the Greeks, man is radically separated from nature- he lives in the realm of nomos, convention, somehow above the realm of physis, nature. He can reason, communicate, choose, create a social order, apprehend ultimate reality, and even …