26-28 September 2024

Neues Institutsgebäude, Universitätsstraße 7, Lecture Hall 3D (3rd floor)

Keynote speaker: Alice Crary (The New School for Social Research)

This three-day conference will focus on the possibilities and limits of imagination and empathy with regards to humans and non-human animals, and on the tensions inherent in comparing or comparatively analyzing both groups.

Imagined similarities and dissimilarities play a pivotal role in ethical theories with regards to treatment of both human and non-human groups.It has been argued, for example, that racialized and disabled people, and nonhuman animals, have been discriminated against according to the same logic that grounds inclusion and exclusion upon the possession of certain distinctively human ‘abilities’: rationality, language, autonomy, agency, etc. (e.g., Crary 2016; Taylor 2018; Crary and Gruen 2022).The presumed absence of these ‘abilities’ is equated with a negative and inferior form of embodiment, against which the human norm has in turn been defined. However, conflating their respective ethical status also risks reinforcing the dehumanization of those human groups by instrumentalizing their oppression in the service of animals (Boisseron2019; Crary 2016; Kittay 2019).

This conference, organized by Martin Huth, Carlo Salzani, and Ruadhán J. Flynn, will take place at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna as part of the project “The Limits of Imagination: Animals, Empathy, Anthropomorphism” (P 35137-G; funded by the FWF, Austria).

Attendance is free, in person and online.Live closed captioning will be available. For the conference program, full accessibility information, and further details, see https://ruadhanjflynn.com/?p=628

To register for online attendance, email ruadhan(dot)flynn(at)vetmeduni.ac.at