ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the various ways that philosophical thinkers and practitioners rework the roles and natures of animals and beasts within conventional religious frameworks in order to suggest alternative cosmic orders. It draws a distinction between those intellectuals who make relatively direct and substantial challenges to Greek religious conventions (e.g. some Pythagoreans and Theophrastus) and those who disrupt religious conventions in an effort not to supplant them but to supplement and re-centre them with new ways of conceiving and being part of the cosmos (e.g. Socrates and Plato). Animals are inserted into or reworked within religious contexts in order to develop our moral capacities and sense of kinship; in some instances, these transformations go a long way towards developing an intrinsic significance of animals (i.e., apart from what they might mean for humans), while at the same time narrowing the gap between human and animal experience.
