Concept
Animal machine
Overview
Animal machine (French: bête-machine), also known as animal automatism, is a concept in early modern philosophy associated especially with René Descartes. In Descartes' account, non-human animals are automata whose behaviour can be explained by bodily mechanism rather than by reason or an immaterial soul. The doctrine formed part of his wider philosophy of mind-body dualism, in which humans alone possess minds capable of thought and language.
Descartes developed this view against the Aristotelian and Scholastic tradition, which explained life in terms of soul and final causes. His account became a well-known part of Cartesian natural philosophy and drew criticism from later philosophers and writers, especially on the question of animal sensation and suffering.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Therefore let the pretended M. Charp deride philosophers who have regarded animals as machines. How different is my view!
Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine
Close in meaning to Animal machine; the term itself is not named.
The second test is, that although such machines might execute many things with equal or perhaps greater perfection than any of us, they would, without doubt, fail in certain others from which it could be discovered that they did not act from knowledge, but solely from the disposition of their organs: for while reason is an universal instrument that is alike available on every occasion, these organs, on the contrary…
René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences
The author is tied to Animal machine in the knowledge graph.
And afterwards when the machine of the body, which has been so fabricated by nature that it can of its own inherent power move itself in various ways, by turning itself at random on every side, followed after what was useful and avoided what was detrimental; the mind, which was closely connected with it, reflecting on the objects it pursued or avoided, remarked, for the first time, that they existed out of itself…
René Descartes, Selections from the Principles of Philosophy
The author is tied to Animal machine in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Animal machine
Related ideas
- Tom Regan
- Cartesianism
- Animal ethics
- Sentience
- Nicolas Malebranche
- Philosophy (journal)
- Mind–body dualism
- Pierre Gassendi
- Peter Singer
- René Descartes
- Ralph Cudworth
- Aristotelianism
- John Cottingham
- Philosophy Now
- Henry More
- Scholasticism
- Animal Liberation (book)
- Oxford University Press
- Royal Society
- Julien Offray de La Mettrie
- Cambridge Platonists
Place in the tradition
Part of British philosophy.