ABSTRACT
Almost every discipline that engages with animals, from biology to anthropology, from philosophy to literature, is in the midst of a crucial reconfiguration of concepts and operating assumptions about them. This is part of the reason for the importance of philosophical ethology: philosophy's traditional roles of criticism and scrutiny have and ought still to contribute valuable insight in the formulation of research questions and the interpretation of contexts of interaction. Philosophical ethology also revisits the lineage of philosophical anthropology, taking up its questions and methods again with the guiding problematic being an investigation of human animality rather than human exceptionalism. In the animal sciences, as in the human sciences, the behavior of certain bodies and populations has been constituted as a domain of knowledge, power, and intervention.
