The Anthropocentrism of Anti-realism

by Leonardo Caffo

The purpose of my talk is to discuss about the issue of metaphysical Anti-realism advocating its ‘Anthropocentrism’ (and speciesism), meaning the theory according to which the species Homo sapiens is endowed with ontological pre-eminence above reality. The standard theory proposed by Anti-realism suggests that one or more classes of objects depend on humans. This theory is contested by the fact – properly analyzed by Jacob von Uexküll (von Uexküll 1985) – that other animals apart from us do perceive the same objects and get acquainted with them. The idea underlying Anti-realism’s theory is that our way of perceiving reality is not only the best one, but the only way possible as well. This incorrect belief is contested by modern science (Caffo 2014) which shows how animals play the same role humans have as ‘shapers of the world’ (Darwin 1881), and furthermore, it represents a dangerous ethical drift that has to be firmly stemmed, as I am going to affirm throughout the paper.

Keywords: Realism, Anthropocentrism, Antirealism, Ontology, Metaphysics 


Biography:
Leonardo Caffo, PhD, is Post-doctoral Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Turin, where he is also member of the LabOnt (Laboratory for Ontology). He has been Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics (Oxford) and visiting scholar of Jawaharlal Nehru University, (New Delhi, India). He has also been Chief of Seminar (Animal Philosophy) with DAAD Program at the University of Kassel (Germany). He is a columnist for ‘Huffington Post Italy’ and ‘Corriere della Sera’ (La Lettura), the Co-director of ‘Animot: l’altra filosofia’, and the founder and past-director of ‘Animal Studies’ and the ‘Rivista Italiana di Filosofia Analitica Jr” and his is also founder and secretary of “Gallinae in Fabula Onlus”. His most recent publications include: Il maiale non fa la rivoluzione (2013), Naturalism and Constructivism in Metaethics (2014), Only for Them, preface to Matthew Calarco and Melanie Joy, (2014), A come Animale (2015), An Art for the Other, preface to Steve Baker, (2015), and Il bosco interiore (2015). Leonardo Caffo has worked in the field of social ontology and realism, animal studies and cognition, applied ethics, and philosophy of anarchism and architecture (in both analytic and continental traditions). Attaching is name to the theory of  “antispecismo debole” (weak antispeciesism), he won the “Premio Nazionale Frascati Filosofia” (2015).