ABSTRACT
Loosely defined under the umbrella of “philosophical ethology,” each offers much to the question of the animal and related problematics in posthumanism, animal studies and critical theory by engaging human/animal relations not merely as textual plays of language but as domains of bodily comportment and conduct. One significant aspect of approaches from eco-, cognitive and ethnoethology to more discussions of ethoethnology and multispecies ethnography, among others, is that they leave behind the older models of the science wars and create or recuperate vital crossovers between these disciplinary areas. 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. Yet renewed, thoroughly non-reductive attention to the ethological domain of human/animal relationships, communities, cultures, histories and futures not only allows but enables and demands that these matters be addressed, by a speculative philosophical ethology.
