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Contents
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| I give some detail of the corpuscularian theorizing about animal growth (including embryology) here. |
The Early Modern understanding of animals is of course central to my argument, because the close relation between the human being and animals (or, as we ourselves are more comfortable saying, other animals) was acknowledged in the Early Modern period, as indeed it had been in Scholastic, and Ancient, thought. For the early Moderns, it was possible to acknowledge that the human being indeed was an animal, though a very special one. The orthodox view was that the human being was the only animal to possess reason, and that this was a highly significant distinction.
How then were animals and their behaviour thought of?
The first point is this.
Given that animal bodies were organisations of particles, the forces that
were invoked to explain how particles got organised vis-à-vis each other
to make up an animal body as a whole were also invoked to explain how the different
discernible parts of the body interacted with each other: a ‘mechanical’ perspective
on the workings of the body was adopted.
| I give some examples and more detail here. |
Some of the behaviour shown by an animal was thought of as flowing from the mechanics of the body – for example breathing, the beating of the heart.
But, secondly, some ordinary animal behaviour was not thought of as explicable in that way. That is, there were some things that ordinary animals 'did' which were not thought of as flowing from the mechanics of the body. (At least, unless you were Descartes.)
[Menu, outline, Reason]
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Created 08:06:05 Prepared by VP Home Page of Web Presentation: Conceptions of the Human Being in the West
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