The cannibal has played a surprisingly important role in the
history of thought--perhaps the ultimate symbol of savagery and
degradation-- haunting the Western imagination since before the Age
of Discovery, when Europeans first encountered genuine cannibals
and related horrible stories of shipwrecked travelers eating each
other. "An Intellectual History of Cannibalism" is the first book
to systematically examine the role of the cannibal in the arguments
of philosophers, from the classical period to modern disputes about
such wide-ranging issues as vegetarianism and the right to private
property.
Catalin Avramescu shows how the cannibal is, before anything
else, a theoretical creature, one whose fate sheds light on the
decline of theories of natural law, the emergence of modernity, and
contemporary notions about good and evil. This provocative history
of ideas traces the cannibal's appearance throughout Western
thought, first as a creature springing from the menagerie of
natural law, later as a diabolical retort to theological dogmas
about the resurrection of the body, and finally to present-day
social, ethical, and political debates in which the cannibal is
viewed through the lens of anthropology or invoked in the service
of moral relativism.
Ultimately, "An Intellectual History of Cannibalism" is the
story of the birth of modernity and of the philosophies of culture
that arose in the wake of the Enlightenment. It is a book that lays
bare the darker fears and impulses that course through the Western
intellectual tradition
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