A Case for Felt Kinship: [Review of Gary Steiner’s book What We Owe to Nonhuman Animals: The Historical Pretensions of Reason and the Ideal of Felt Kinship, London and New York: Routledge, 2024]

The review discusses the volume What We Owe to Nonhuman Animals: The Historical Pretensions of Reason and the Ideal of Felt Kinship, the latest work published by Gary Steiner, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Bucknell University. The monograph provides an overview of and a challenge to the anthropocentrism of the Western philosophical tradition. In particular, it forcefully advocates for the recognition of the full moral status of nonhuman animals, going against the grain of the hegemonic Western philosophical stance. The review introduces the main arguments advanced by the author and addresses the volume’s structure, the conclusions it reaches, and the relevance of its discussion for the status of nonhuman animals.