The Aristotelian Carnivore The Ethical Afterlives of Aristotle’s Theory of Animal Irrationality (original) (raw)

Revue de sciences religieuses, 2019

Abstract

At least since Richard Sorabji’s Animal Minds and Human Morals (1993), Aristotle’s theory of animal irrationality has been viewed as a major turning point in the Western ethical approach to animals. The influential idea traced back to Aristotle is that we are allowed to eat animals because they are irrational. This essay reviews the evidence by reconstructing key steps in the reception of the human/animal differentiation on the level of psychology. It shows that in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, philosophers were in fact less concerned than present-day ethicists with the ethical implication of depriving animals of certain faculties. In the first part, Porphyry’s and Augustine’s views of animal (ir)rationality are compared, showing that their arguments bear some similarity despite their opposite ethical outcome. As the second part discusses, rationality is treated by Domingo De Soto and Tommaso Campanella (as well as by one of their main sources, Thomas Aquinas) as a category of dominion. In the conclusion, these case studies are taken together to suggest that the meaning attributed to human rationality, and not the irrationality of animals, was viewed as the key ethical criterion in the Medieval and Renaissance reception of Aristotle’s psychology.

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