Animal Religiosity: Opportunities and Ontological Limits of an Impervious Philosophical Proposal

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the fascinating hypothesis of animal religiosity. In this respect, we are interested in Donovan Schaefer’s philosophical proposal, specifically his text Religious Affects. In Schaefer’s conceptual framework, the ‘theory of affects’ finds a privileged place, basically as an emphasis on the importance of the pre-linguistic affective sphere. Here, man and animal can learn about kinship, which, according to Schaefer, also implies religious experience. However, this kind of concept of ‘religious feeling’ distances itself from the legacy of the phenomenology of religion. By criticizing this specific aspect, we will try to understand where this proposal can generate aporetic signs of discontinuity with a reliable concept of religiosity. In our concluding thesis, we will show that the importance given to animals, given correct ecological thinking, does not have an enemy in the religious specificity of man.