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Chapter 7.2 Rene Descartes Descartes (1596 - 1650) was a French philosopher and mathematician whose articulate reasoning about the nature of animals was and still is widely held by many people, to the detriment of animals. Descartes maintained that animals cannot reason or feel pain and are automata. Descartes held that only humans are conscious, have minds and souls, can learn and have language, and therefore only humans are deserving of compassion. That animals are unfeeling machines was a convenient belief in an era when vivisection was widely practiced. Under this view the exploitation of animals cannot be morally wrong for you cannot harm machines. Although much of Descartes’ life is unknown, there is indirect evidence that he dissected live animals for a time (1).
Descartes is widely interpreted as philosophising that animals cannot think or feel pain. An alternative view is he did not really feel this in his heart. See Cottingham: A Brute to the Brutes.
Philosophy honours Descartes as the first modern philosopher. Before Descartes' people asked about what the world is and how ought we to live in it. But Descartes asked what can we know of the world, now the branch of philosophy called epistemology. Descartes' great contribution to knowledge was his method of tackling the questions he posed. He did not accept established ideas about the world as his starting point, as had generally been the rule since the Ancient Greeks. Instead, he began by asking the most basic questions. He questioned everything he could, tried to take nothing for granted, and if he found ideas unsound he discarded them.
From Descartes' method grew the philosophy of rationalism, the belief that everything can be known about the world by sitting down and reasoning about it. Hence he did not have to prove that animals are automata but only argue that they are. Rationalism dominated Western philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries before giving way to empiricism, the method of the emerging science. Empiricism supports the belief that all knowledge must derive from observation and experience via our senses. No amount of reasoning will tell you if it is raining outside, you have to go and look. Descartes is famed for concluding that, even if all his thinking was wrong, there was one thing he could be intuitively certain about: if he was thinking then he must be existing, encapsulated in the famous phrase, cogito ego sum - I think, therefore I am. Reference Shepherd K R D: Rene Descartes, Philosopher and Scientist. Citizen Philosophy. 2015. ›› To Entries & Home |
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