Thread 24653425

>humans are the only concious species, every animal is just acting on instinct with absolutely no thought or emotion, that's just us missatributing what we think of as child-like behaviour onto them, they can scream and beg for mercy all they want but it's all a ruse, there's no pain inside
>hmm that's very interesting mr Descartes, tell me, how did you arrive at this conclusion, considering we can observe all of our own behaviours in mammals when observed closely enough, including dreaming (and thus perception of the world independent of outside stimulus, aka thoughts, similar to our own) and compassion (animals in captivity have been frequently observed caring for not only non-members of their family, but other species entirely)?
>uhhhh well uhhh the bible says so idk

Were all philosophers between Agrippa and Schopenhauer retarded? Plato would give an analogy to show why he thinks what he does, but whenever I try to read a the works of a philosopher from the timeframe i said before, it's always just statements that we're supposed to take as fact with 0 reasoning or, at best, vague gesturing towards some kind of reasoning that's never actually mentioned.

>>24653425 (OP)
>>>hmm that's very interesting mr Descartes, tell me, how did you arrive at this conclusion, considering we can observe all of our own behaviours in mammals when observed closely enough, including dreaming

He says it outright in Discourse on Method. Parrots can repeat human words yet they can’t form sentences of their own because he perceived them as lacking cognition and intellect whereas even mute men can understand words spoken to them because intellect is present within them yet they lack speech capacity (opposite of parrot who has speech capacity yet lacks cognition).

That is not particularly convincing evidence for his thought but he does outright say how he achieved that reasoning.

>>24653425 (OP)
>Were all philosophers between Agrippa and Schopenhauer retarded?
No, that would leave out Seneca and Plutarch. But your general idea is correct, philosophy does take a very sharp decline around this time. I wouldn't say there are *no* philosophers who don't just spout dogma at you during the timeframe, but the only one I can think of would be the ethiopian hermit Zera Yacob, and there's reasons to think that was all a 19th century forgery... Even if it wasn't, the fact that he was marginalised and pushed to the fringes of society AND could only be accepted in ethiopia of all places, not in europe, shows you just how much the west has fallen...

As tempting as it is to blame christianity though, I really think neo-platonism was the beggining of the decline.

>>24653425 (OP)
Kant is basically everything you need... he sums every interesting bit up and makes it better than everyone before and after him...

Start with the greeks... end with Kant...

The best three philosophers are Plato, Aristotle and Kant...

And that even though Kants transcendental Idealism is in fact retarded... but whatever everything else he said is highly based

>>24653431
Did he know there are non-verbal people..?
That's more of an explenation as to how the idea first entered his head, as though he come up with that via 1 basic observation then never contemplated on it, it's not an explenation as to the thought process, more of an explenation of how the idea first came to him.

It'd me as if I told you a story about how i dropped a rock onto the pavement, and the resulting crackle sounded kinda like a scream. From this I conclude that rocks are in fact living creatures, and moreso, every object in fact has a distinct soul and is capable of feelings.

That's a true story from when i was a little kid, but then I thought about it for a while and was able to come up with numerous problems with that idea, so I dropped it. It seems like decartes never thought, ideas just came to him and he accepted them unconditionally, which would make him retarded.

>>24653444


>For it is a very remarkable thing that there are no men, not even the insane, so dull and stupid that they cannot put words together in a manner to convey their thoughts. On the contrary, there is no other animal however perfect and fortunately situated it may be, that can do the same. And this is not because they lack the organs, for we see that magpies and parrots can pronounce words as well as we can, and nevertheless cannot speak as we do, that is, in showing that they think what they are saying. On the other hand, even those men born deaf and dumb, lacking the organs which others make use of in speaking, and at least as badly off as the animals in this respect, usually invent for themselves some signs by which they make themselves understood. And this proves not merely animals have less reason than men but that they have none at all, for we see that very little is needed to talk (Descartes, 1637/1960, p. 42).

Yeah he probably knew non-verbal people existed. Prob just assumed they don't possess a soul.

>>24653444
>It'd me as if I told you a story about how i dropped a rock onto the pavement, and the resulting crackle sounded kinda like a scream. From this I conclude that rocks are in fact living creatures, and moreso, every object in fact has a distinct soul and is capable of feelings.

Sort of related but some ancients did think that magnets had souls because they're capable of moving things and soul is attached to motion.

>>24653447
>For it is a very remarkable thing that there are no men, not even the insane, so dull and stupid that they cannot put words together in a manner to convey their thoughts.
I read that as him legitemately just not knowing that though. I mean he says no such men exist.

>>24653452
The thing here is, I can understand the reasoning.
They ask how come we can move our arms and legs but say, grass can't move out of the way so you don't step on it, well there's some force or attribute we and animals have that other actors don't, "soul".
This gets accepted as a common explenation, makes sense. Then magnets get discovered, so they try to retrofit an old idea by saying "well this must also posess a soul".

It reminds me of how people came up with increasingly elaborate explenations for phlogiston, the idea that objects contain a substance that becomes fire when escaping from it. It made more sense than the 4 elements theory and so became accepted, but it started to become apparant it's wrong when people did things like, weighing an object before and after it was set on fire (weighed more)... oh, that must mean phlogiston has negative mass! And so on. It's wrong, but there's a reasoning to it, it's trying to adapt an old framework to new evidence instead of coming up with a new one.

>>24653425 (OP)
He was entirely correct, he just forgot to clarify that he talks about a hypothetical Platonic form of a "human", while actual existing humans including himself are indistinguishable from animals.

>>24653447
>usually invent for themselves some signs by which they make themselves understood.
my dog does indeed do that

>>24653425 (OP)
His argument is that animals lack the incorporeal mind(\soul) that makes us human and that everything human we see in animals is just a mirror of ourselves.

>>24653447
"Non-verbal people" are just snowflakes acting up.
It's really a consequence of permissive parenting. They should have had it beaten out of them as children.

>>24653489
He clearly never owned a dog.

>>24653518
he was vivisecting them

>>24653518
One s was English poet said most people are like good animals, and you know how good animals behave if you’ve ever kept pets. But he made the distinction between those and real people.

>>24653518
One English poet said most people are like good animals, and you know how good animals behave if you’ve ever kept pets. But he made the distinction between those and real people.

>>24653532
>real people
The Jews?

Fun fact! Descartes called his dog mister scratch because he believed the beast didn't itch because it (in his opinion) had no interior life for such phenomena and therefore only scratched himself like a robot. Supposedly, however, he was kind to the animal despite this

>>24653425 (OP)
nearly everything post-bacon is hot dog shit and produced the outrageously corrupt and destructive world we live in today. no doubt if humanity gets through the shit storm coming soon that most if not all of the enlightenment and its intellectual thought will need to be purged from all historical record with a platonic lie to cover up and warn all future generations from venturing too far for their own good

He said this >>24653425 (OP)
To justify this >>24653527
But actually this is true too >>24653658

>>24653425 (OP)
>with absolutely no thought or emotion,
Thought - maybe, but they can feel emotions. And most animals, at least complex ones, do feel pain.

>>24655664
Schizo apocalyptical chud babble to cover up how brutally filtered you were by the Early Moderns. The 17th century was one of the highest peaks of philosophy

>>24653425 (OP)
It's just your bog standard anthro-centric world view.
For most of history, philosophers couldn't bring themselves to accept that humans are just another animal, they were convinced that humans must be something separate, something more special in a metaphysical sense compared to animals.

But the reality is that we are simply a little smarter than other animals.
Other animals best us in many other areas such as speed, strength, longevity, eyesight, etc. We best them in intelligence and opposable thumbs, that is more or less all we have.

This egotistical worldview is applied to more things also. We were convinced that we were the centre of the universe, that the Earth was special, that we were special.
We constructed entire systems of reasoning that hinged on humans being somehow special.
It was a stupid thing to do