While the human population increases day by day, a large number of animal species are becoming extinct. Plastics take over the seas, forests are cut down to support extensive livestock farming and monocultures, while the threat of the emergence of new diseases becomes more tangible than ever. Since the last century we have witnessed, as never before in history, the intensive devastation of ecosystems coupled with the advancement of technology and industry, as well as an important development of means of communication and transport. At the same time, various voices have begun to seriously question the activity of human beings on the planet and their relationship with nature.

The selection of authors whose work is analyzed in this book – Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Tom Regan, Giorgio Agamben, Peter Singer and Martha Nussbaum – aims to offer an initial map of the thought about animals in the nineteenth century. 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. Thus, while the effort continues to offer a rigorous and well-documented study on how the history of philosophy has thought about the animal question, a call is made for philosophy to become aware of the violence with which human beings have related with the other species that co-inhabit our planet.