On June 5th, the second PhD student from the international community of the PhD program Philosophy, run under the auspices of the Centre for Ethics, successfully defended her dissertation.
Mira Tan Reyes presented the thesis entitled Otherwise than Anthropocentrism:: Lévinas Face-to-Face with the Animal and defended it in discussion with external reviewers Tony Milligan (King's College London) and Jan Bierhanzl (Charles University in Prague/Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences). The thesis presented a novel attempt to productively use Lévinas’ ethics for the purposes of animal ethics and to make such use of it that would overstep its relatively narrow confines. It defended Lévinas against the charge of such a kind of anthropocentrism that would make his notion of “face” impossible to extend into non-human contexts, and also creatively exploited Lévinas’ notions of “eros” and the erotic to shed light on significant human-animal relationships. A considerable part of the discussion centred around the question of bypassing the “dark” side (or potential) of Lévinas’ notion of eros and the legitimacy of making this step in its recontextualization in animal ethics.
We congratulate Mira and are looking forward to following her future career!
