Wednesday March 4th, 12pm, 6206C Phelps Hall
Please join us for a Brown Bag talk by Prof. Renan Larue co-sponsored by the Comparative Literature Program and the Departments of French and Italian and German and Slavic Studies.
"Are Humans Really the Center of the Universe? A Brief Genealogy of Western Anthropocentrism"
One of the defining psychological, philosophical, cultural, and metaphysical features of Western thought is anthropocentrism: the idea that the human species stands at the center and at the summit of Creation. According to this doctrine, a divine power has created the entire universe for the sole purpose of subordinating it to Homo sapiens. This worldview, rooted largely in Aristotelian philosophy and Stoic thought and later widely propagated by the Catholic Church, has long puzzled or even amused other civilizations. It has also been the object of sustained criticism, including within the Greco Roman world itself, most notably by thinkers associated with the Pythagorean tradition. In this presentation, Renan Larue will offer a simplified genealogy of the long standing debate between defenders and critics of anthropocentrism, a debate that remains very much alive today. To illustrate this intellectual conflict, he will examine the vegetarianism of Empedocles and Ovid, the emergence of the concept of the food chain, the legacy of geocentrism, the narcissistic wounds identified by Freud, the utilitarian approach in animal ethics, and finally the hypothetical existence of extraterrestrial beings more intelligent and more advanced than ourselves.
Renan Larue is Professor of French studies and Comparative Literature at UCSB. His research focuses on the intellectual history of food ethics, animal ethics, and the philosophical foundations of vegetarianism and veganism from Antiquity to the modern period. He works at the intersection of literature, philosophy, religious studies, and the history of ideas, with particular attention to how humans define themselves in relation to animals and the natural world. He is the author of several monographs, including Le Végétarisme des Lumières (Classiques Garnier, 2019) and Le Végétarisme et des ennemis (PUF, 2015) for which he was awarded the La Bruyère Prize from the Académie française for best book in moral philosophy. Since 2021, his research has also focused on the concept of anthropocentrism and its discontents, examining how Western scientists, writers, and philosophers have engaged with the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations. He co-wrote Les Extraterrestres (PUF, 2022) with Prof. Estiva Reus on that topic.