The World, Humans, and the Other Animals: Martin Heidegger and the Question of Anthropocentrism

Giuliana GREGORIO

doi:10.24193/subbphil.2026.2.04

Authors

Giuliana GREGORIO PhD, Full Professor in History of Philosophy at the University of Messina (Italy), ggregorio@unime.it, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4863-7006

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24193/subbphil.2026.2.04

Keywords:

Heidegger, anthropocentrism, world, human beings, animals

Abstract

This article reconsiders Heidegger’s critique of modern subjectivity through the lens of the question of anthropocentrism. While he decisively rejects the modern conception of the human as the sovereign subject and denounces the technological reduction of beings to objects, his account of the human–animal relation remains deeply ambiguous. On the one hand, the human is displaced from the metaphysical centre and redefined through openness to Being and responsibility rather than domination. On the other, Heidegger repeatedly grants humans a unique ontological privilege that sharply separates them from other living beings, leaving unresolved whether his thought genuinely escapes the anthropocentric framework it seeks to challenge.

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