Costello's son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother's lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his mother's vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority.
At the dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological, and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth Costello seems offensive and flaky, but -- dare he admit it? -- strangely on target.
Here the internationally renowned writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally changed issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep humanconviction -- Coetzee brings all these elements into play.
As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee's text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. Together the lecturefable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation. --このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。
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クッツェーの講演と、それに応え、さまざまな学問領域の洞察を加えた序文と4つのリフレクションズで構成されているこの本は多少哲学的でもあった。コステロの意見を通じての私の意見は、結局人間はどの動物よりも弱いと言えるかもしれない。それ故、動物のなかでの人間の優位性と、力を誇示しているのかもしれない。それはきっと、他の動物を殺す事や、それらを哀れむという形で表れているだろうという事だ。読んだ後にも考えさせられるとても奥深い作品だ。
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