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Chapter 2 - Xanthus, Achilles’ Speaking Horse (Equus eloquens)
Julia Kindt, University of Sydney
Book:

The Trojan Horse and Other Stories

Published online:

09 November 2023

Print publication:

11 January 2024, pp 33-62
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Summary

The second chapter touches more firmly on the philosophical debate and the arguments for human exceptionalism put forward over its course. The chapter puts Xanthus (the prophetic horse from Homer’s Iliad) as the first and prototypical speaking animal in the Western tradition in conversation with other famous speaking animals, including Plutarch’s speaking pig Grunter (Gryllus), a speaking rooster who claims to be a re-incarnation of the philosopher Pythagoras, and Kafka’s Red Peter. The chapter shows that the figure of the speaking animal is central to Western conceptions of the human. In classical antiquity, it features in stories that confirm the vertical relationship between humans (at the top) and animals (below). And yet, at the same time, right from the start of the conversation in the ancient world, the apparent anthropomorphism of the speaking animal was also used to critique the very idea of human exceptionalism. There is a direct line between how some modern animal fables point to man’s animal nature and the concept of the human explored in parts of the ancient evidence.

Ten Ancient Creatures That Make Us Human
Julia Kindt
Published online:

09 November 2023

Print publication:

11 January 2024
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What makes us human? What, if anything, sets us apart from all other creatures? Ever since Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, the answer to these questions has pointed to our own intrinsic animal nature. Yet the idea that, in one way or another, our humanity is entangled with the non-human has a much longer and more venerable history. In the West, it goes all the way back to classical antiquity. This grippingly written and provocative book boldly reveals how the ancient world mobilised concepts of 'the animal' and 'animality' to conceive of the human in a variety of illuminating ways. Through ten stories about marvelous mythical beings – from the Trojan Horse to the Cyclops, and from Androcles' lion to the Minotaur – Julia Kindt unlocks fresh ways of thinking about humanity that extend from antiquity to the present and that ultimately challenge our understanding of who we really are.

13 - Derrida's reading of Heidegger
- By Françoise Dastur, Archives Husserl de Paris; Ecole Françoise de Daseinsanalyse
Edited by Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Boston University
Book:

Interpreting Heidegger

Published online:

11 April 2011

Print publication:

17 March 2011, pp 273-298
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Summary

Derrida's first reading of Heidegger in the long text dedicated to Emmanuel Lévinas and published in 1964 under the title "Violence and Metaphysics" shows that he understood the deep meaning of the Heideggerian question of being. Derrida attaches great importance to the passage, in the text that Heidegger dedicated in 1955 to Jünger where Heidegger puts a cross over the word "being" in order to avoid the almost ineradicable habit of seeing in being something subsistent and facing man: a gesture which Derrida sees as a way, in writing, of delimiting logocentrism and metaphysics of presence. Nietzsche is the theme of play that can be found in some of Heidegger's texts such as The Thing and The Principle of Reason. At the end of the first part of Of Grammatology Derrida stresses that the metaphysical concept of time cannot be used to describe the structure of the trace.