Philosophical Barnacles and Empiricist Dogs: Knowing Animals in Modernist Literature and Science

In the early twentieth century, both literature and science writing began experimenting with animal perspectives, imagining how creatures radically different from us would perceive and understand the world. This technique reflected a contemporary interest in animal minds, but it also led scientists to question their own epistemological assumptions and gave writers an opportunity to develop an aesthetics of defamiliarization. This essay examines works by C. Lloyd Morgan, J. B. S. Haldane, and Virginia Woolf, arguing that they use the technique of animal perspectives and the trope of the philosophizing animal to reflect on how we as humans know the world and the other animals within it. Their writings presage the methods and questions guiding cognitive ethologists today.