Tom Tyler’s reinvention of the bestiary is a remarkable achievement, and Tyler emerges as an engaging storyteller. The book’s teeming pages are full of improbable pleasures, pictorial and philosophical. Presented with modesty and wit, the result is an audacious account of what it is not to be human. This is a beautifully written book of exceptional imaginative range and it amounts to nothing less than a poetics of the posthuman.

CIFERAE is a remarkable accomplishment. Tyler provides the most subtle and thorough analysis of anthropocentrism I have encountered; and his critical reworking of the relationship between animals and philosophy allows for an extraordinarily rich understanding of more-than-human subjectivities.

CIFERAE engages and pushes forward the theoretical foundation of human-animal studies. Tyler aptly develops a critique that encourages the recognition of a perspective that decenters human experience as the primary mode through which knowledge is produced. This work also has pragmatic implications, as it clears a path to understanding people’s subjective experiences as ‘more than human.’

Delivers tremendous insight into philosophy’s indefensible anthropocentrism, concluding that pragmatic knowledge (and its refusal of a “God’s eye view”) is most promising.

CIFERAE is a tour de force through occidental philosophy, aiming at leading humankind from anthropocentrism into biocoenosis, without dispensing with its exceptionality . . . Tyler's approach, which consists of countering anthropocentrism through encounters with epistemological animals, succeeds in deploying the dialectic between thinking as praxis, and thinking as reflection on praxis. Thus, by reconstructing anthropocentrism he manages to expose its idealistic core.

Sizable but thoroughly convincing. . . [CIFERAE] is a thoroughly enjoyable experiment in literary analysis and creation, a very original attempt at weaving very different themes — epistemology, animals, and hands — into a broad discussion that constantly plays with its own elements.

Tom Tyler’s trenchant study of anthropocentric and philosophical discourse, part of Cary Wolfe’s impressive “Posthumanities” series, is an important addition to the literature on human knowledge and epistemology, approached here through philosophy’s unsteady preoccupation with non-human animals. The book itself is something of a marvel—modeled on the medieval bestiary, it comes complete with ornamental capitals, eclectic marginal glosses, and around the border of the pages an illustrated menagerie of animal “indices”—many drawn from these earlier bestiaries.

This book is an experience.

For scholars in science studies and animals studies, CIFERAE offers a thought-provoking and entertaining opening onto a question of central importance: whether and how our membership in the human species, or in any other species, determines what we can know.

Tom Tyler’s CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers is a playful philosophy with a serious purpose. This is a cogently argued and beautifully produced (and illustrated) argument for why the persistent invocation of animals in philosophy is significant, and for why animal knowing (as Nietzsche recognized) drives a cart and horses through anthropocentricism.

The book is not merely an astute jeu d’esprit around our ways to count and account animals. It also carefully probes the ostensible anthropocentricism of three dominant epistemological paradigms in Western thought: realism, relativism, and pragmatism.

There is a lot going on in this book. Not only does the volume contain thought-provoking images—sketches, etchings, photographs—but extensive footnotes containing interesting facts and observations feature on every page, all of which capture the imagination, and provide context for the philosophical discussion.

For all that a further installment proves a beguiling prospect, it is perhaps CIFERAE’s greatest accolade that its singularity makes the idea of a sequel very hard to conceive.

Engaging with most if not all the usual suspects of Euro-American philosophy,

"Tyler's book is liberating and playful. ... The book is full of ideas and has the form of an inventive and playful encyclopaedia or bestiary - a page-turner for days when the thirst for knowledge hits you."

CIFERAE is not only intellectually stimulating but is also an artful volume replete with running marginalia of illustrations, captions, and sidebar passages. Continentalists in the European mode and pragmatists in the American style should find true treasure in Tyler’s text.

Written in a lively, punning style, CIFERAE deserves to be read by anyone with an interest in responding to the challenge of thinking—and living—in a multi-species world.

Ultimately, and this is precisely the value of Tyler’s text, pragmatic epistemology does away with the noxious productions of humanism and of all the various anthropocentric denials.

Beautifully illustrated and playfully written—a timely and crucial contribution to critical animal studies scholarship.

Written in a lively, punning style, CIFERAE deserves to be read by anyone with an interest in responding to the challenge of think—and living—in a multi-species world.