Buch, Englisch, 447 Seiten, PB, Format (B × H): 144 mm x 222 mm, Gewicht: 577 g
Reihe: Basic Philosophical Concepts
New Essays
Buch, Englisch, 447 Seiten, PB, Format (B × H): 144 mm x 222 mm, Gewicht: 577 g
Reihe: Basic Philosophical Concepts
ISBN: 978-3-88405-116-0
Verlag: Philosophia Verlag
Dieser Band vereinigt siebzehn Forschungsbeiträge zu historischen und systematischen Themen, die sich mit dem philosophischen Begriff des Tiers verbinden. Zu den historischen Themen gehören das Verhältnis zwischen dem Organismus eines Tiers und seiner Umwelt, die Natur und der Ursprung der Tierseelen, die Metaphysik der biologischen Reproduktion von Tieren, und die moralische und rechtliche Stellung von Tieren in der Philosophie der Antike, der Renaissance, des 17., 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts. Zu den systematischen Themen gehören Fragen zur Natur von tierischer Erfahrung und Bewusstheit, die Rolle der Alltagspsychologie in der Erforschung des Geists der Tiere, die mereologische Analyse der Einheit des Organismus eines Tiers, und die Rolle unserer Natur als Tiere für die Analyse der persönlichen Identität. Auch aktuelle Fragen zum Status von Tieren im Naturrecht, zur Möglichkeit von moralischen Emotionen bei nicht-menschlichen Tieren, und der Rolle der Vernunft für das Verständnis des Verhältnisses zwischen menschlichen und nicht-menschlichen Tieren werden diskutiert. Alle Beiträge sind speziell für den vorliegenden Band entstanden.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
Kristin Andrews
A Role for Folk Psychology in Animal Cognition Research
Andreas Blank
Daniel Sennert and the Late Aristotelian Controversy over the Natural Origin of Animal Souls
Hans Burkhardt
Aristotle, Leibniz, and Contemporary Medicine on the Mereological Structure of Animals
Gary Chartier
Aligning Natural and Positive Law: The Case of Non-Human Sentients
Tobias Cheung
Inside and Outside: The Animal Worlds of Cuvier’s,Richerand’s and Cabanis’s Living Systems,
Stephen R. L. Clark
Going Beyond Our Worlds to find the World: What "Reason" is Really For
Devin Henry
Soul as a Cause in Aristotle
Hiro Hirai
The Souls, Formative Power and Animal Generation in Renaissance Medical Debates
Balint Kekedi
Descartes’ Wondering Automata
Peter Machamer
Animals and Human Thoughts
Ariel Meirav
The Unity of Animals and their Status as Paradigmatic Wholes
Eric Olson
The Role of the Brainstem in Personal Identity
Pauline Phemister
Malebranche and Leibniz on the Animals
Pouwel Slurink
Consciousness as an Adaptation What Animals Feel and Why
Justin E. H. Smith
The Criminal Trial and Punishment of Animals: A Case Study in Shame and Necessity
Rina Tzinman
Against the Brainstem View of the Persistence of Human Animals
Introductory Essay
1
Animals and Human Thoughts*
Peter Machamer
I had a cat. Oti was his name. He died a year ago from many viru¬lent abdominal cancerous tumors. I cried when he died. My wife cried more. Our son, young Michael cried the most. He said that Oti was his best friend. I ought to have started by saying “we had a cat.” Still, my first question is, can a cat be your friend?
“Anthropomorphism” is a term, coined in the mid-1700s, to describe attributions of human characteristics (or characteristics assumed or believed by some to belong only to humans) to animals or non-living things. Examples so described include attribution to animals, plants, and forces of nature. Winds, rain, or the sun have been depicted as creatures or even gods with human motivations, and/or the abilities to reason and converse. The sun has been Apollo. The rain is Tess, and they call the wind Mariah (from the Lerner and Lowe musical, Paint your Wagon). Sometimes, even inanimate machines are anointed with human perversities, for ex¬ample, my damn recalcitrant computer. It raises questions about ‘machines that think’. Animated films abound with likeable animals performing anthropomorphic acts, especially talking. The film Ratatouille (2007) features a rat that talks, cooks great food for humans, and works with people and other rats, and human viewers are both fascinated and appalled that a rat, a species we despise, is doing all this.
Let us return to my question: Can a cat, or any pet, be a friend? It is a trite truism to say, “A dog is man’s best friend”. But the questions remains: is this true and appropriate, or a just loose metaphor, or is it anthropomorphism because we’re attributing to an animal what may only properly be attributed to a human? Yet deeper philosophical problems lie to hand. I began the essay with “I had a cat.” “Had”, in this context, usually means ownership or possession, or some such relation. But does the ‘logic’ of friend preclude ownership or possession? Some people, like Albert Ca¬mus, would say that a slave couldn’t be a friend to a master and vice versa. Friendship, they might say, requires some degree of equality, which certain relationships preclude by their constitutive unequal nature.
If it bothers you to call a pet by the term “friend”, then try “companion,” which is a term often used to refer to pets that are important to people. Yet the difference between a friend and a companion is not all that clear. Perhaps though a companion is just some creature that is present in one’s life that provides some bene¬fit. Many elderly or ill people hire human companions to be of aid and service to them. Being a companion doesn’t seem to imply that there needs to be any sympathetic or affectionate interactions. Companions often perform their functions for rewards. By contrast, pet are often seem to be genuinely loyal and non judgmental, and, we hope it is not just because we feed them. Besides we name them, and refer to them by their gender.
Part of the puzzle in thinking about animals as friends de¬rives from questions about how equal they are to humans. But the puzzle is much greater. Fundamentally the big perplexity is, what are the criteria, if any, for the distinction between humans and other ani¬mals? Do humans have a unique properly that no animal can possi¬bly have? Historically people have answered: Yes, hu¬mans do have some certain unique property. That property might be an immortal soul, reason, language use, or … The search was for a differentia to distinctively and definitionally cleave humans from the rest of the class of animals.
Historically, René Descartes held that animals were au¬tomata. It was not quite that simple for Descartes, but let us con¬trast him with Thomas Hobbes, who thought that many animals were capa¬ble of fairly complex prudential thought, problem solv¬ing, and learning. However, even for Hobbes, animals did not have lan¬guage ability, and so they could not reason about universals. Only the memory of their experiences kept animals from being mired in the occurent particular. Contrast that again with late 17th century French dog owners, who argued that their pet dogs must have hu¬man souls for otherwise they could not go to heaven, and heaven would not be heavenly if little “FiFi” were not there.
Charles Darwin has been interpreted as holding that the ani¬mal-human connections are along continua stretching out through evolutionary history. It is unclear if this view, even if Darwin had held it, could provide for a principled distinction, even if it did allow for a clear and clean demarcation among species. Philo¬sophically, subscribing to this evolutionary view might entail that there exist no necessary and sufficient conditions that can be given for being human (even if there are criteria demarcating some ani¬mals from others). In an even more Darwinian evolutionary mode, it might mean that what it is to be a human changes over time. (Perhaps, changing “human” for “hominoid” will provide a more familiar context for this claim.) But it is not at all evident that phylogenetic continuity and descent is sufficient to blur the dis¬tinction between humans and other animals. Yet it has been argued by animal rights activists that making any such distinction is just a form of species chauvinism, and it has been likened to various forms of racism. However, I do not want to get into the animals as food for humans issues. Another contemporarily common argu¬ment is that the genome of the chimpanzee is 96 percent similar to humans. Frans de Waal, a primate scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, says, “Darwin wasn’t just provocative in saying that we descend from the apes—he didn’t go far enough. …We are apes in every way, from our long arms and tailless bodies to our habits and temperament.”
Now I, personally, do not know enough or actually any¬thing about immortal souls to discuss that as a possible criterion. Though my dear Greek friend, Aristides Baltas once said he would like to be reincarnated as one of our cats, but that was before he was mar¬ried. I do know that most everybody disagrees with Des¬cartes about animals being automata. It is rumored that even Des¬cartes had dog, and it seems he cared for it and wanted it kept safe. I also am unsure how to countenance the many-of-the-same-genes-as-a-chimp argument. Certainly Clint Eastwood (in Any Which Way You Can, 1980) has a ‘buddy’, who is an orangutan called Clyde. But again it’s fantasyland. The case of Viktor Franken-stein’s monster (in Mary Shelley’s novel) is even more fantastic to fit in. The mon¬ster, being a creature brought back from the dead, presumably has all the same genes as a human, but without a soul. But the irony of the novel is that, in many ways, the artificially created monster is ‘more human’ than the human characters, who lack empathetic and other inter-personal skills that we believe humans ought to have.
However one decides the pet issue, most animals are not pets. Most are not even domesticated. A pet is an animal kept for com¬panionship and enjoyment, as opposed to wild animals, live¬stock, laboratory animals, working animals, and sport animals, which are kept for specific economic or particular purposes. Yet, one might keep a pet because, e.g., walking the dog provides the owner exer-cise, fresh air, and social interaction with other dog owners. More¬over, being kept by a human is not a sufficient crite¬rion for being a pet. Even giving a name to an animal does not make it a pet, though it does establish some relation between the human and the animal, but mostly on the human’s side. Humans also, through a long history, have kept menageries and established zoos or zoo¬logical gardens, which often serve for human purposes of enter¬tainment and/or enjoyment.
Maybe we could look at human attitudes and actions to¬wards animals to glean a criterion? Most people do not worry about swatting flies or squashing cockroaches. These animals are differ¬ent enough from humans to not warrant any respect. The swatter and squasher are well aware that these animals are alive, but they are nasty, unclean, and annoying. So their death is not a problem for most people. Killing may be harder when we must kill a human who seriously is threatening ourselves or our loved ones. So maybe harmful, annoying, and threatening are the differentiae we are looking for. But that cannot be. A working animal is kept by hu¬mans and trained to perform tasks. They may be part of the family, such as guide or service dogs, or they may be animals trained strictly to perform a job, such as logging elephants. There is now a medically approved class of therapy animals, mostly dogs, which are brought to visit confined humans. These animals are not an¬noying, harmful, or threatening—quite the opposite. They are use¬ful for human purposes. Further, very few people would kill a pet cat because it is being annoying (which it can be). When we harm or kill something we tend to distance ourselves from that creature. We impersonalize it. The killer in Silence of the Lambs (1991) calls his woman captive “It”, so he does not have to hu¬manize her.
Perhaps, then, Hobbes, Descartes, and Noam Chomsky were right: it is the ability to use language that separates humans from animals. In the late 1950s through the 1970s, this was a hotly de¬bated topic. Everyone agreed that animals had certain limited forms of communication, but were they sufficient to count as a language? Of course, any answer presupposed that there was at least a set of reasonably clear criteria for what a language was. It was this that was the subject of most of the animals have or have not language debate. Some linguists and philosophers put forward such criteria. Critics answered either that animals, mostly chim¬panzees, fulfilled them or that the criteria were not adequate. I never found any clear answer or consensus. However, I have a cat that sits at my feet and meows when he is hungry or seeking affec¬tion. When I speak to him, he stares quite attentively and, quite often, answers back with a soft meow. I am told that cat’s do not meow or talk to each other, but only do so in response to humans, from whom they have learned to talk. Given my experience, I would be hard pressed, except for ideological reasons, to attribute this cat ‘talk’ learning to reward or operant conditioning.
Another criterion would distinguish persons from other ani¬mals on the basis of reason. Of course, reason was the tradi¬tional differentia in the definition: Man is a rational animal. In more modern form (following Wilfrid Sellars), this claim may be made by saying that only persons may inhabit the space of reasons. Now usually this claim was tied to theses about concepts and their rela¬tion to language. But taking this route would lead us back to lan¬guage again. So let’s try a different path: Responsibility. Many contemporary philosophers, following a Sellarsian line, would say something like: only persons may be held responsible for their actions, since such actions are intentional and can backed by ex¬plicit reasons. But I know of no good reason to limit mind reading to persons. I am quite sure I can often know what my pet is in¬tending, and, in many cases, intervene to stop the intended action. They cannot make their reasons explicit by using language, but many times the context and background make the reason for the intention clear. When I leave town for a while, my cat will not relate to me for some days after my return. I am not sure this is exactly like a reaction due to separation anxiety, but it is pretty close. And animals clearly form expectations, which is a lot like drawing inferences. I must admit to being on Hobbes’ side of this debate, for I do believe that animals think, intend, and act for pur¬poses or reasons. I am not sure that they are self-aware that this is why they did what they did. But then I am often unclear about how self-aware people are when they do some of the things they do.
Let me end these reflections by considering one other pos¬sible criterion: laughter. We have a cat, Milo, who makes us laugh at his antics and posturings. I laugh a little. My wife laughs a lot. But Milo, the cat, doesn’t laugh. He does often look bewildered. So he does not fulfill the being-able-to-laugh criterion. But I have known people who are seemingly incapable of laughter, particu¬larly of being able to laugh at themselves. And I have seen chim¬panzees that seemingly are laughing at others and at themselves.
Perhaps, I had best close with a poem by Ezra Pound, called Meditatio:
When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs
I am compelled to conclude
That man is the superior animal.
When I consider the curious habits of man
I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.
