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    STUDIA BIOETHICA - Issue no. 2 / 2015  
         
  Article:   ANCIENT GREEK ROOTS OF MODERN ADVOCATING FOR ANIMAL PROTECTION AND WELFARE.

Authors:  ŽELJKO KALUĐEROVIĆ.
 
       
         
  Abstract:  The advocates of questioning the dominant anthropocentric view of the cosmos are becoming increasingly louder in raising (bio)ethical requirements for a new resolution of the relation between humans and other living beings, by claiming that the following of western philosophical and theological tradition has caused the present ecological, and not merely ecological crisis. Attempts are being made to establish a new relationship by relativizing the differences between man and non-human living beings often, by attributing specifically human properties and categories, such as dignity, moral status and rights, to non-human living beings. In this paper the author investigates the antecedents of the views deviating from the mainstream Western philosophy, in the sense of non-anthropocentric expansion of ethics, and finds them in the fragments of the first philosophers of nature, in which a kind of mixture of corporeal and psychical elements, i.e. the kinship of all varieties of life is emphasized. Pythagoras, Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Democritus, in this context, considered certain animals as sacred, i.e. they believed that animals are responsible for what they do and that they have a soul, intelligence, consciousness, ability to think, mind and reason. The author, finally, believed that the solution for the mentioned crisis does not lie in a simple levelling of animals upwards, i.e. in the attribution of similar or identical emotional and intellectual characteristics to all living beings, but in the adequate paideutic approach which shall develop in people an inherent bioethical model of accepting animals as being that deserve moral treatment, respect and adequate treatment.

Keywords: anthropocentrism, non-anthropocentrism, anticipation, pre-Socratics, man, animals, kinship, responsibility, protection, welfare
 
         
     
         
         
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