Animal.

Thank you all for participating today.

Today's presentation will be on the second Great Idea from The Syntopicon. We will discuss "Animal." Our presentation will be in four parts. First, we will cover the differences between man and animals. Second, we will cover the distinctions between animals and plants, as well as the anatomy of animals. Third, we will cover the two views of the animal kingdom: the static view and the dynamic view. Finally we will discuss the philosophy of animal taming.

Our last presentation was "Angel." Had it not been for alphabetical constraints, "Man" would have been the appropriate Great Idea to cover between these two extremes.

Another Great Idea to be covered in a future presentation is "God".

Any time these four concepts are put together in the same bag, we run into the inevitable sololoquy by Hamlet:

"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!"

At different times man will regard himself as an animal, as an angel, or as one created in God's image. Seldom does he regard himself as less than the paragon of animals. There are exceptions now and then. Now and then some philosopher will choose to glorify animals.

Montaigne made reference to legends found in Pliny and Plutarch which described the marvelous exploits of animals. Montaigne claimed that foolish pride and vain opinion led men to regard themselves as superior to animals.

"When I play with my cat," Montaigne writes, "who knows whether I do not make more sport of her than she makes of me? We mutually divert one another with our monkey tricks; if I have my hour to begin or refuse, she also has hers."

Montaigne claims that man does not communicate well with animals, and he wonders whose fault it is. Satirists like Swift idealize animals as a way of showing the depravity of man.

In his last voyage, Gulliver goes to the Houyhnhnms. There he finds a society dominated by a noble race of horses. The horses have domesticated a breed of human-looking creatures called the Yahoos. The Yahoos are a sorry lot.

In contrasting humans with animals, two difficult questions dominate most debates. The first is: "Do animals have souls?" The second is: "How do instincts differ from intelligence?"

We will first cover the matter of souls.

The first grade has "only the power of life." The second grade has sensation. The third grade is where intelligence has its throne.

Aquinas concurs with Augustine's triple gradation of the soul. Aquinas goes further and distinguishes four grades of life.

In the first grade exist life forms with only vegetative power, such as plants. In the second grade exist life forms with vegetative power and sensitive power but no locomotive power, such as shellfish. In the third grade exist the animals with locomotive power, the ones that can run, swim or fly. In the fourth grade exist animals with intellectual power-namely, men.

Aquinas considers grades 1 and 2 to be imperfect animals. He considers grades 3 and 4 to be perfect animals.

Descartes claims that the soul is identified with the intellect. He says a soul is, "a thing which thinks, that is to say a mind . . . or an understanding, or a reason."

Descartes conceived the soul as a spiritual and immortal substance. From this can we conclude that animals do not have souls?

Descartes prefers to regard an animal as a machine: "If there had been such machines, possessing the organs and outward form of a monkey or some other animal without reason we shoul not have had any means of ascertaining that they were not of the same nature as those animals."

Hobbes also used mechanical principles to account for the actions of animals: "For what is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body?"

Next we cover the issue of how instincts differ from intelligence.

Aquinas claimed that God gave instincts to animals as a survival tool and gave reason to man as a survival tool.

A lot of theological dogmas about predestination are aimed more at instinctive behavior than at rational behavior.

Instinct is an instrument of pre-determined behavior, and reason is an instrument of freewill. "Man has by nature," Aquinas writes, "his reason and his hands, which are organs of organs, since by their means man can make for himself instruments of an infinite variety, and for any number of purposes.

Darwin, James, and Freud take a different view. They attribute instinct to men as well as animals.

"Man has a far greater variety of impulses than any lower animal," writes James, "and any one of these impulses taken in itself, as is 'blind' as the lowest instinct can be; but, owing to man's memory, power of reflection, and power of inference, they come each one to be felt by him, after he has once yielded to them and experienced their results in connection with a foresight for those results."

On the same grounds, James argues that "every instinctive act, in an animal with memory, must cease to be 'blind' after being once repeated, and must be accompanied with foresight of its "end" just so far as that end may have fallen under the animal's cognizance."

Montaigne, on the other hand, attributes intelligence and reasoning to animals. "Why does the spider make her web tighter in one place and slacker in another?" Montaigne asks. "Why now one sort of knot and then another, if she has not deliberation, thought, and conclusion?"

In another place he asks, "What is there in our intelligence that we do not see in the operations of animals? Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained than that of bees? Can we imagine that such and so regular a distribution of employments can be carried on without reason or prudence?

In this part, we will cover, first, distinction between plants and animals and, next, anatomy.

One school maintains that the division between the two kingdoms is distinct.

Another school maintains that there is a distinct gradation between the two.

In his treatise "On the Soul," Aristotle draws a sharp line between the two.

He writes, "living may mean thinking or perception or local movement and rest, or movement in the sense of nutrition, decay, and growth. Hence, we think of plants also as living for they are observed to possess in themselves an originative power through which they increase or decrease in all spatial directions; they grow up and down, and everything that grows increases its bulk alike in both directions or indeed in all, and continues to live so long as it can absorb nutriment."

Aristotle assigns to plants a vegetative soul. This sould possesses three basicfaculties common to all living things-nutrition, growth, and reproduction.

Aristotle assigns to animals a sensitive soul. Characteristic powers of a sensitive soul are sensation, appetite, and local motion.

Galen, in his Natural Faculties, uses the word natural for those effects such as "growth and nutrition . . . common to plants as well as animals."

Galen uses the word psychic for such activities as "feeling and voluntary motion . . . peculiar to animals."

Traditionally living things have been divided into two kingdoms. (although the the current state of the science uses five kingdoms.)

There are numerous examples of what Bacon calls, "bordering instances . . .such as exhibit those species of bodies which appear to be composed of two species, or to be rudiments between the one and the other."

"If we look even to the two main divisions, namely, to the animal and vegetable kingdoms," writes Darwin, "certain low forms are so far intermediate incharacter that naturalists have disputed to which kingdom they belong."

Darwin did not, however, find sufficient evidence to determine whether all living things are descended "from one primordial form."

Since Darwin's day, Loeb and Jennings have studied the issue further.

The phenomena of tropisms (a sunflower turning toward the sun) may or may not be a form of local motion.

The immobility of barnacles may or may not be different from the rooted immobility of plants.

Either a continuity does not exist, or more acute observations are called for.

It is against the background of these issues that we come to the study of anatomy.

Anatomy is an ancient science.

Several surgical treatises of Hippocrates show an extensive knowledge of the human skeletal structure and the disposition of the organs.

Aristotle dissected animals and wrote treatises on their comparative anatomy.

Galen studied how the structures of organs related to local motions of animals.

Harvey, a later investigator, schooled in the traditions of ancient biology, made the startling discovery that circulation of the blood was related to motions of the heart.

"Respect for our predecessors and for antiquity at large," wrote Harvey, "inclines us to defend their conclusions to the extent that love of truth will allow. Nor do I think it becoming in us to neglect and make little of their labors and conclusions, who bore the torch that has lighted us to the shrine of philosophy."

In Harvey's opinion, the ancients "by their unwearied labor and variety of experiments, searching into the nature of things, have left us no doubtful light to guide us in our studies."

Harvey adds, "no one of a surety will allow that all truth was engrossed by the ancients unless he be utterly ignorant . . . of the many remarkable discoveries that have lately been made in anatomy."

The Great Books exhibit continuity in the basic problems of biology as well as the logical conclusions of their solutions.

The issue of spontaneous generation, as opposed to procreation, runs through Aristotle, Lucretius, Harvey, and Darwin.

Problems of sexual differentiation and sexual characteristics run through Aristotle, Darwin, and Freud.

Questions of heredity run through Plato, Darwin, and Willian James. These were enlarged by the work of Mendel, Bateson, and Morgan.

Knowledge of the respiratory and nervous systems are discussed by Haldane, Sherrington, and Pavlov.

In this section we will cover two theoretical models of the animal kingdom.

Aristotle is the master of the static model with Linnaeus as his star pupil.

Darwin is the master of the dynamic model with Buffon as his star pupil.

Aristotle sets forth his classification system of animals most fully in his History of Animals.

There one kind of animal is distinguished from another by many "properties:" By locale or habitat; by shape and color and size; by manner of locomotion, nutrition, association, sensation; by organic parts and members; by temperament, instinct, or characteristic habits of action.

With respect to some of these properties, Aristotle treats one kind of animal as differing from another by degree-by more or less-of the trait.

With respect to other properties, he finds the difference to consist in the possession by one species of a trait totally lacking in another.

He speaks of the lion as being more "ferocious" than the wolf, the crow as more "cunning" than the raven; but he also observes that the cow has an "organ of digestion" which the spider lacks, the lizard an "organ of locomotion" which the oyster lackes.

The sponge lives in one manner so far as "locale" is concerned, and the viper in another; reptiles have one manner of locomotion, birds another.

So ample were Aristotle's data and so expert were his classifications, that the major divisions and sub-divisions of his scheme remain intact in the taxonomy constructed by Linnaeus.

While Aristotle and taxonomists before Darwin classified animals by their similarities and differences, Darwin used genealogy or descent as the primary criterion for grouping animals int varieties, species, genera, and phyla.

Naturalists, according to Darwin, "try to arrange the species, genera, and families in each class, on what is called the Natural System. But what is meant by this system? Some authors look at it as merely a scheme for arranging together those living objects which are most alike, and for separating those which are most unlike . . . The ingenuity and utility of this system are indisputable."

Darwin thought its difficulties could not be overcome except "on the view that the Natural System is founded on descent with modification-that the characters which naturalists consider as showing true affinity between any two or more species, are those which have been inherited from a common parent, all true classification being

genealogical-that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking, and not some unknown plan of creation, or the enunciation of general propositions, and the mere putting together and separating objects more or less alike." []: Darwin adds, "the importance of embryological characters and of rudimentary organs becomes "intelligible on the view that a natural arrangement must be genealogical." []: The related issues of continuity vs. heirarchy, and difference of degree vs. difference of kind are covered in many places in The Syntopicon.

In our final section, we will discuss the philosophical implications of animal taming.

One indicator that a primitive society is advancing and becoming civilized is the domestication of animals.

Aeschylus claimed that the taming of animals, along with fire, was a gift to man from Promethius.

The Iliad makes frequent references to how animal taming increased man's quality of life.

Homer referred to Castor as "breaker of horses."

The Homeric epithet "horse-taming" is a term of praise which is frequently applied, both to the Argives and to the Trojans.

Aristotle points out that one mark of a wealthy man is, "the number of horses which they keep for they cannot afford to keep them unless they are rich."

For the same reason he explains, "in old times the cities whose strength lay in their cavalry were oligarchies."

Aristotle claims, where plants exist for the sake of animals, animals exist for the sake of man. Pursuing this line of logic further, he justifies his claim that some people were naturally cut out for slavery.

Although Spinoza does not share Aristotle's views on slavery, he does share his views on animals.

"The law against killing animals," Spinoza writes, "is based upon an empty superstition and womanish tenderness, rather than upon sound reason. A proper regard, indeed, to one's own profit teaches us to unite friendship with men, and not with brutes, nor with things whose nature is different from human nature."

"I by no means deny," he continues, "that brutes feel but I do deny that on this account it is unlawful for us to consult our own profit by using them for our pleasure and treating them as is most convenient to us, inasmuch as they do not in nature agree with us."

Other moralists declare that men can befriend animals. (or "critters" as Elly Mae would put it)

St Francis tried to persuade men to love, not only their neighbors, but all God's creatures.

Marcus Aurelius writes, "As to animals, which have no reason, and generally all things and objects, do thou, since thou has reason and they have none, make use of them with a generous and liberal spirit."

Source: Philosophy-irc.org