De anima
'The soul is, so to speak, the first principle of living things. We seek to contemplate and know its nature and substance' For the Pre-Socratic philosophers the soul was the source of movement and sensation, while for Plato it was the seat of being, metaphysically distinct from the body that it was forced temporarily to inhabit. Plato's student Aristotle was determined to test the truth of both these beliefs against the emerging sciences of logic and biology. His examination of the huge variety of living organisms - the enormous range of their behaviour, their powers and their perceptual sophistication - convinced him of the inadequacy both of a materialist reduction and of a Platonic sublimation of the soul. In De Anima, he sought to set out his theory of the soul as the ultimate reality of embodied form and produced both a masterpiece of philosophical insight and a psychology of perennially fascinating subtlety. Hugh Lawson-Tancred's masterly translation makes De Animafully accessible to modern readers. In his introduction, he places Aristotle's theories at the heart of contemporary debates on the philosophy of life and being.
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- Not sure why Aristotle is being cited here, where does he talk about boredom in Nichomachean Ethics? Refresh my memory.
I dunno if you've read it, but The Nichomachean Ethics, which is where eudaimonia is treated, is basically a parenting book for a slave owning upper class. It is not a book about how you, a grown adult, experiencing mental paralysis in a hedonistic consumerist Capitalist society that has orders of magnitude more abundance, can get out of said paralysis. Not. At. All.
Edit: I wanna be really clear. Aristotle has some very useful things to say, particularly in De Anima, which, IMO, is the sole philosophical definition of a soul that is capable of being set in alignment with the concept of evolution, but the Ethics is a really big hype job that has lots of important sounding phrases taken wholly out of context. Aristotle is at his best when he is just a scientist, like in De Anima, or any of his zoological works.
- Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics, and De Anima.
- Interesting aside about the Vienna circle and isomorphism. I suspect that’s where Hayek got his idea that mind and representation are isomorphic, echoing Aristotle’s assertion in “On the Soul” / De Anima that the mind becomes the object of perception.
- > Dogs think.
The fashion in which they do it is recognized by Aristotle in Historia Animalium, as well as in Metaphysics and De Anima.
He also mentions it in passing in Nicomachean Ethics (III.ii)
> Choice, then, seems to be voluntary, but not the same thing as the voluntary; the latter extends more widely. For both children and the lower animals share in voluntary action, but not in choice, and acts done on the spur of the moment we describe as voluntary, but not as chosen.
* https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.3.iii.html
> It seems that choosing is willing, but that the two terms are not identical, willing being the wider. For children and other animals have will, but not choice or purpose; and acts done upon the spur of the moment are said to be voluntary, but not to be done with deliberate purpose.
* https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/aristotle/nicomachean-ethi...
- > The only reason why animal consciousness has been controversial historically is a religious one—the Bible has typically been read as placing humanity in a category of its own.
Did you just make this up? Because it's obviously not true. And you conflate two concerns, namely, "having consciousness" and "placing humanity in a category of its own".
First, you don't see denial of consciousness in other animals in the ancient or medieval world. If anything, it is much more natural to conclude other animals are conscious based on observation than it is to deny consciousness. Even today, I don't know anyone who denies animals are conscious. Everyone treats their pets, for instance, as conscious beings, because they are. Now, people also anthropomorphize animals, sure, but there's a difference between the two degrees of attribution. Attributing consciousness is far more conservative than attributing human qualities in an equivocal way.
Take Aristotle's De Anima, for example, in which he analyzes the varieties of life according to the kind of "soul" each possesses, and such that each higher soul entails the powers of all the lower souls. The three kinds he identifies, ordered from lowest to highest, are the nutritive soul, characteristic of plants; the sensitive soul, characteristic of animals; and the rational soul, particular to human beings. Even here, we can see both a certain uniqueness to human beings alongside what you might call the consciousness of animals by virtue of the sensitive soul. What differentiates human beings from all the animals is not that they are conscious, but that they are rational.
Second, where the Bible is concerned, I have no idea where you get the idea that it claims other animals lack consciousness. Consider just these two passages from the Old Testament:
Genesis 9:2-3: "The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea [...]"
Do you see any mention of rocks in this verse? Do things lacking consciousness live in fear?
Proverbs 12:10: "The righteous care for the needs of their animals, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel."
I suppose you could be kind to an unconscious living thing in the sense that can act for its objective good, but it seem a little strange to speak of animals in this way, but not plants, if animals are as unconscious as plants.
Now, yes, human beings are recognized as different from the other animals as early as Genesis, having been created in the image of God, which has to do with a relation of analogous similarity with God, where human beings are understood as personal creatures possessing rational intellect and free will ("analogous" cannot be stressed enough; the infinite God is very much unlike any created being, and so any similarity can only be analogical; see the analogia entis). However, it does not follow that the other animals lack consciousness. The ancients and medievals would find this claim ridiculous.
If you want to know where the denial of consciousness in other animals began, you can thank modern thinkers like Descartes, who posited that the universe is composed of two kinds of things, res extensa and res cogitans. Res extensa is merely extension in space, while res cogitans is the seat of thought, sensation and thus consciousness. According to this anthropology, of the animals, only human beings are a composite of both, and so only human beings are capable of consciousness. The angels are res cogitans, while the other animals are mere res extensa. In other words, according to Descartes's mechanistic worldview, animals are effectively insensate machines.
And so this is a recently development in history, very much occurring within the ferment of modernity. Materialism also finds its roots in Descartes, not because he was a materialist himself, as he admitted the existence of res cogitans that is not reducible to res extensa, but because he framed things in those terms. Materialists, operating within those parameters, reject the existence of res cogitans, instead claiming that all that has been attributed to res cogitans is reducible to res extensa. Of course, it isn't (e.g., the problem of qualia, or the problem of intentionality), which is why materialism was stillborn, but now transmuting into preposterous things like eliminativism among a stubborn remnant of believers.
- I cannot recall whether this was in Oderberg's "Real Essentialism"[0] or Gilson's "From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again"[1], but in one of the two, I believe the author cites Maritain's view that there is essentially only one species of living things (in addition to human beings, whom Maritain, of course, recognized as possessing rational faculties, faculties that by their nature transcend non-intellectual life). This would seem to avoid the various questions about speciation and how it is possible, and certainly where there exists such ostensible radical potentiality for producing such variation along a lineage over time.
And this agrees with the former book, in which Oderberg distinguishes between a phylogenetic understanding of species, and an ontological understanding. The traditional ontological definition for "human" is "rational animal". It is composed of the genus "animal" and the specific difference "rational" that differentiates the human species from among the other species in the genus "animal"[2]. Under this traditional way of defining species, rational life on other planets would, therefore, qualify as human. "The aliens" would be, in some sense, "one of us", even if they were to differ phylogenetically. This becomes quite interesting in the context of an analysis along the lines of Aristotle's "De Anima", as, for example, rationality has definite entailments when it comes to anatomy and physiology.
[2] I am using the terms "genus" and "species" in the relative, ontological, intensional sense[3], not the narrow biological sense, as more or less meaning "broader category" and "narrower subcategory", respectively. Thus, we can say that the species of triangle is a plane figure that has three straight bounding sides, where "plane figure" is the genus, while having three straight bounding sides is the specific difference.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genus%E2%80%93differentia_defi...
