Leon Borgdorf at the Messerli Research Institute (Photo Credit: Thomas Kainberger) On December 1st, Leon Borgdorf gave a talk at the Messerli Research Institute on mercy as a fundamental virtue in animal ethics. Leon, a PhD candidate at Utrecht University, works on the ethics of emerging technologies in animal agriculture — especially genome editing — and looks at these issues through the lens of virtue ethics. Instead of focusing only on rules or consequences, virtue ethics

Dr. Zipporah Weisberg gives a lecture on humanism at the University of Vienna  (Photo Credit: Oliver Hirtenfelder) On November 11, 2025, Dr. Zipporah Weisberg – who teaches at the University of Ottawa and is a guest researcher at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna – gave a compelling talk at the University of Vienna’s Department of Philosophy. Her central message was both surprising and refreshing: despite decades of critique, the humanist tradition still contains valu

VAS Members have actively been engaging in knowledge dissemination, especially as it relates to matters concerning animals and ethics. Carlo Salzani appeared in episode 1 of the Tiereethik weiterdenken , a German speaking podcast focused on animals and ethics. Carlo discusses his recent book, The Limits of Imagination , and delves into the world of empathy. Doris Schneeberger also appeared on Knowing Animals , an animal studies podcast in which Josh Milburn talks to scholars

On the 10th of September, Dr Leonie Bossert started the Vienna Animal Studies (VAS) 2025 Winter Lecture Series by asking whether geoengineering has the potential to help animals or if it just presents another “techno-fix” informed by ideas of human domination.

More than twenty people gathered on the 11th of June 2025 to hear Dr Carlo Salzani talk on the development of the modern zoo. Focusing on Schönbrunn Zoo, Dr Salzani used Foucault's models of power as a theoretical grid to argue that ‘the zoo’ and ‘the prison’ are expressions of the same disciplinary matrix.

Carlo Salzani, VAS member and animal ethicist, recently published Animals, Empathy, and Anthropomorphism: The Limits of Imagination. We caught up with him to find out more about this open access book and his motivations for writing it.

Receipt of works in the form of scientific articles, essays, reviews, interviews, literary texts, images or other formats that reflect on the theme, with a deadline of June 30, 2025 . Two and a half millennia ago, Aristotle provided Western political philosophy with a model that would establish the coordinates that define and organize politics and subjectivity in the West: in Book I of his Politics , he defined "man" (the masculine in the English translation, absent in the Gr