Book Reviews

As I was beginning to think about preparing this review, a colleague picked up Tom Tyler’s CIFERAE off my desk and began flipping through its pages. A few moments later, he put it back down and expressed some bewilderment about its title and chapter headings, which include such mysteries as “On the Ring Finger a Ram’s Testicles” and “The Thumb Is a Little Hand, Assistant to the Greater”— each of the five chapter titles evoking one of the fingers of the hand. What, he asked, is this book supposed to be about? I can now give a straightforward answer: this book investigates and rejects the idea that epistemological anthropocentrism is a necessary component of realist, relativist, and pragmatist philosophies of knowledge. It also makes a less straightforward and possibly more interesting point about how philosophers can and should engage with nonhuman animals. And it does so precisely through its inscrutable titles and playful design, which includes 101 (CI in Roman numerals) illustrations of more or less wild animals (ferae). What might at first appear to be postmodernist obscurantism and needless noodling around turns out to be neither postmodernist nor needless, and indeed essential to Tyler’s project. First, the straightforward argument. Tyler is concerned with what he calls “first-and-foremost anthropocentrism” or “epistemological anthropocentrism,” which he defines as the notion that humans “are stopped up, as if within a bleak, restricting container, unable to access the wider world except through the translucent but necessarily distorting sides of their prison” (p. 3). His focus is therefore not on that kind of anthropocentrism that has been called speciesism, which simply asserts the superior importance and moral status of humanity, but rather on the more subtle claim that knowledge as such is “inevitably . . . determined by the human nature of the knower” (p. 21). After an introductory discussion, Tyler dedicates one chapter each to realism, relativism, and pragmatism. For each of the three philosophical approaches, he investigates the ontology, utility, and validity of knowledge: that is, what knowledge is (either “mediating representation” or “immersive practice”), what it does (“explanation of the world” or “interpretations of a worldview”), and what it claims (“transcendental truth” or “partial perspective”) (p. 210). He concludes with a chapter on the figure supposedly at the center of knowledge—anthropos, Homo sapiens, humanity, “man”—and on