| of philosophical vegetarianism, an idea with a history of nearly 1,000 years in ancient Greece. The belief that it is wrong to eat animals was upheld by some of the most prominent ancient philosophers: Pythagoras, Empedocles, Theophrastus, Plutarch, Plotinus, Porphyry, and perhaps even Plato. Then the idea curiously died out for almost seventeen hundred years. After such a long dormancy, all that remained of the idea was ashes, out of which blooms the phoenix of contemporary philosophical vegetarianism. This movement, born in the 1970s, has generated an enormous literature of scholarly books and articles in the most respected philosophy journals. An annotated bibliography of the debate over contemporary philosophical vegetarianism is presented at the end of this volume. |
| Unfortunately, few scholars attend to the fact that philosophical vegetarianism is a phoenixlike presence. Those with the most occlusive blinders think that the issues surrounding this idea were created ex nihilo, or perhaps out of the environmental movement of the 1960s. Consider the complete title of Peter Singer's book, the most influential piece in the modern debate: Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. The curious word in this title is "new," because Singer himself offers a thirty-page summary of the history of philosophical vegetarianism.1 Michael Fox, who apparently is not a vegetarian and who criticizes Singer, is more on the mark when he says that the controversy regarding vegetarianism is not a new one, but a rekindling of an old one.2 My point is not to criticize Singer's position; in fact, I largely agree with him. Rather, my hope is to give the contemporary debate some much-needed depth. I plan to accomplish two things through my treatment of Greek philosophy: (1) I will use the tools and insights of the contemporary debate to better understand and criticize the inadequacies of ancient philosophical vegetarianism. And (2), 1 will use ancient wisdom as an Archimedean point from which I will criticize not only the opponents of contemporary philosophical vegetarianism, but also its defenders. In short, the phoenix I talk of can fly in two directions. |
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