Understanding animal worlds: analyzing the openness of the worlds of animals in the light of Uexküll and Merleau-Ponty

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2021-01-14
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nl
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Understanding what others perceive, has always been a tricky question for philosophers. In A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans Jakob von Uexküll has expanded the question of the other into the realm of all animal life. His theory of the Umwelt relates the perceived environments of animals to their own personal perspective. As every animal has its own unique perceptions, due to the subjective aspect of it, their worlds look fundamentally different. This raises the question whether we can interpret such environments at all. Surely we can study their perceptive organs and behavioral attitudes, but is this in the end not just an expansion of our own subjective experiences of animal life? Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach towards animal life, as presented in The structure of Behavior, and his concept of inter-animality, as explained in Nature and The Visible and the Invisible, present a framework that allows for a bridge between ourselves and the environments of animals, while at the same time acknowledging the uniqueness and opacity of their perception and experiences.
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Faculteit der Filosofie, Theologie en Religiewetenschappen