Il tramonto dell’onestade. Paolo Cherchi. Biblioteca italiana testi e studi 6. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2016. 340 pp. €28.
though he makes the case that Singer’s arguments represent the logical culmination of an animal-rights philosophical tradition rooted in British empiricism and utilitarianism, it would have been nice to see him engage, say, with Elizabeth de Fontenay’s landmark work Le Silence des bêtes: La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité (1998), which presents a very different picture than the one here, one that complicates the relationship between animal welfare and animal rights. Jan Miernowski’s exploration of the very different reasons why both humanists and antihumanists are unable to acknowledge the humanity of the “human bomb” provides the opportunity for deep reflection on ethics and metaphysics, yet one wonders whether approaching the figure of the selfdestructive terrorist through the more commonly used phrase “suicide bomber” would have opened other avenues of inquiry. Just as Miernowski’s introduction skillfully lays out a history of the emergence of twentieth-century structuralism, his afterword gestures beyond antihumanism and toward a nascent posthumanism, in which the human dissolves into an ever-changing creaturely realm. The emergence of this theoretical paradigm has already opened new avenues of inquiry while presenting its own challenges, yet this volume testifies eloquently to the enduring legacy and relevance of Renaissance humanism, with its many paths not taken and lessons left to learn.