Animals, on this view, are mere ‘automata’, entirely devoid of conscious experience. The famous French philosopher-scientist René Descartes (1596–1650) concurred that animals are indeed ‘thoughtless brutes’, entirely without reason – but he went even further, suggesting by implication that they lacked feelings and sensations and indeed consciousness altogether. Ancient and medieval philosophers, such as Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), were of the firm opinion that animals lacked the capacity for thought and reason, though they believed that animals certainly had feelings and sensations. But do they have thoughts? Do they really understand, know and reason about things? Philosophers are notoriously divided on the question. But is anything else sapient? What about birds, dogs, apes and dolphins? There seems little doubt that they perceive and feel. Certainly human animals are sapient – we dignify our species with the name Homo sapiens, after all. But just which animals fall into the category of sapience is a vexing question. Moreover, many animals, though perhaps not all, have inner experiences and sensations they can feel pain, for example, and experience fear and pleasure – at least it certainly seems that way.Īmong the animals, there are those that are not only sentient but also sapient: they have some kind of intellectual capacity for understanding, thinking, reasoning and knowing – in short, they have the capacity for rational thought and action. Animals, of course, are sentient beings, or at least many animals are, for they are aware of their environment, in the sense that they can perceive, to varying degrees, what goes in it. While they certainly exhibit responses to various sorts of stimuli, it would be stretching it to say they perceive things in their environment or that they have inner experiences or sensations, that they can, for example, feel pain. Plants do not undergo any experiences they are not ‘awake’. Their activities include nutrition, growth and reproduction, but they are not sentient they have no sensations or sensory awareness or consciousness of the world around them. But while plants are alive they do not have any kind of mental life. Plants, however, are living organisms, as are animals. Rocks and chairs are pieces of inanimate matter they are not just dead, they are the kinds of things that can never have been alive, at least not in their present form. Two of the most fundamental contrasts we draw are between living and non-living things – the animate and inanimate – and between things with minds or mentality and those without. 1 The quick and the dead – the minded and the non-minded
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