Philosophical Anthropology and Interspecies Solidarity Volume 8 - Issue 3

Michael Allen*

• Department of Philosophy, East Tennessee State University, United States

Received:July 14, 2023;   Published: July 24, 2023

Corresponding author:Michael Allen, Department of Philosophy, East Tennessee State University, United States

DOI: 10.32474/JAAS.2023.08.000289

 

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Opinion

Nonhuman animals (henceforth animals) pose an especially strong case of the problem of other minds. This is the problem of justifying the belief that others possess minds, that they indeed have thoughts and feelings like oneself. If this is dubious in the case of other members of one’s own species, then it is surely preposterous in the case of members of other species. In the seventeenth century, Descartes reasoned other minds with similar thoughts and feelings was a problem to be solved rationally by a process of reasoning from oneself as a solidarity ‘I’ to other thinking and feeling human beings. As for animals, he thought they are just mindless mechanisms, robots or ‘anibots.’

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