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Approaching Other Animals with Caution: Exploring Insights from Aquinas's Psychology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Daniel D. De Haan
Daniel D. De Haan*
Affiliation:
Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, Faculty of Theology and Religion, Gibson Building, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG
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Abstract

In this essay I explore the resources Thomas Aquinas provides for enquiries concerning the psychological abilities of nonhuman animals. I first look to Aquinas's account of divine, angelic, human, and nonhuman animal naming, to help us articulate the contours of a ‘critical anthropocentrism’ that aims to steer clear of the mistakes of a naïve anthropocentrism and misconceived avowals to entirely eschew anthropocentrism. I then address the need for our critical anthropocentrism both to reject the mental-physical dichotomy endorsed by ‘folk psychology’ and to articulate a more adequate ‘commonsense psychology’ that acknowledges most embodied animal behavior is observable psychological behavior. Next, I argue that we can develop Aquinas's doctrine of estimation and conation to formulate an account of nonhuman animal action that more adequately characterizes the purposeful behaviors of nonhuman animals. To do so, we first need to recognize a wider range of nonhuman animal behaviors that are captured by Aquinas's ‘estimative sense’, and that all of these behaviors are specified by a finite variety of particular goods confined to the animals’ environmental niches. But we also need to supplement Aquinas's account of human and nonhuman animal agency by exploring the ontogeny and ecology of how humans and other animals become attuned to affordances within these different environmental niches. I argue that we should look to Aquinas's account of nonhuman animal capacities in ST I-II 6-17 for subtle insights that can expand our understanding of how nonhuman animals engage in purposeful behavior by exercising analogous nonrational and imperfectly voluntary forms of intention, deliberation, choice, execution, and enjoyment. I conclude with an outline for how future enquiry can seek to explain the nonrational purposeful problem-solving competencies of chimps, canines, corvids, cetaceans, cephalopods, and other nonhuman animal species.

Keywords

Thomas AquinasAristotelianhylomorphismhylomorphic animalismcritical anthropocentrismaffordancescommon-sense psychologyanimal psychologyestimation
Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 100 , Issue 1090 , November 2019 , pp. 715 - 737
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Even Frans de Waal concedes this much. ‘You won't often hear me say something like this, but I consider us the only linguistic species. We honestly have no evidence for symbolic communication, equally rich and multifunctional as ours, outside our species. It seems to be our own magic well, something we are exceptionally good at. Other species are very capable of communicating inner processes, such as emotions and intentions, or coordinating actions and plans by means of nonverbal signals, but their communication is neither symbolized nor endlessly flexible like language. For one thing, it is almost entirely restricted to the here and now.’ de Waal, Frans, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), 106Google Scholar (=Animals).

2 Oderberg, David, Real Essentialism (Routledge, 2007), chs. 8-9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; De Haan, Daniel, ‘Hylomorphic Animalism, Emergentism, and the Challenge of New Mechanisms in Neuroscience’, Scientia et Fides 5 (2) (2017): 9–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 The general contours of Aquinas's animal psychology are complemented by these 3 E’s of radical embodied, enactive, embedded cognition theorists. See Hutto, Daniel and Myin, Erik, Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content (MIT Press, 2013)Google Scholar; idem, Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content (MIT Press, 2017).

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7 Oderberg, Real Essentialism.

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14 Bernard Lonergan, Insight; Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue; idem, ‘First principles, final ends, and contemporary philosophical issues,’ in The Tasks of Philosophy, 143–178; idem, ECM, ch. 4.

15 ‘In considering the problem of perception in man and animals the first question to ask should be, what is there to be perceived? And the preliminary answer would be, the environment that is common to man and animals.’ Gibson, James, Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 7Google Scholar.

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18 Contemporary theorists typically employ some version of Daniel Dennett's distinction between personal and subpersonal levels. Aristotelians can generalize the distinction between personal and sub-personal levels to include other animals by employing an equivalent distinction between the psychological and sub-psychological levels. See Jennifer Hornsby, ‘Personal and Sub-Personal: A Defence of Dennett's Early Distinction,’ Philosophical Explorations 3 (1) (2000): 6–24; De Haan, “Hylomorphic Animalism, Emergentism, and the Challenge of New Mechanisms in Neuroscience.’

19 Lonergan, Insight; Oderberg, Real Essentialism; De Haan, Daniel, ‘Hylomorphism, New Mechanisms, and Explanations in Biology, Neuroscience, and Psychology’ in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science, eds. Simpson, W.M.R., Koons, R.C., Teh, N.J. (Routledge, 2017)Google Scholar.

20 Gibson, Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems.

21 ST, I, q. 78, a. 4; I, q. 83, a. 1; Sentencia libri De anima II, 13.

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25 Thomas Aquinas, Expositio libri Posteriorum, II, lt. 20.

26 Sentencia libri De anima, II, 13. Hutto develops a similar point at length, but where I speak of estimative registrations he speaks of the iconically guided instrumental thinking and intentional attitudes of nonverbals. He writes ‘…perceptually based responding might be extended beyond the confines of an immediate here-and-now. If so, off-line imaginings can serve as the instrumental components for the kind of nonverbal thinking that Bermúdez has argued can only be achieved if we assume nonverbals have propositional attitudes. Off-line images can be thought of as the counterparts to local indexical guides (LIGs); they would be local iconic guides. Extended nonverbal cognition can therefore be thought of as being iconically guided. Importantly, iconic thinking could influence behavior “at a distance,” enabling quite kinky links to associated remembrances. Surely the empiricists were right about this much. Yet because they resemble perceivings, imaginings—like their perceptual counterparts—inherit the properties of being tied to certain proprietary domains: they too are in a sense local in their intentional directedness. And in this explanatory context, this fact turns out to be a virtue, not a vice. For it would neatly explain why even the most sophisticated feats that nonlinguistic thinking exhibit are importantly limited. The means-end reasoning of our ancestors was apparently limited in scope, only being applicable in certain domains and with respect to certain tasks. Nonverbals, quite generally, seem incapable of reasoning in an open-ended way that characterizes true inferential, conceptual thought. Their thinking is best understood as being restricted to islands of practical rationality, as opposed to operating in the continuous, unfettered space of reasons ….’ Hutto, Folk Psychological Narratives, 84.

27 For us, Aquinas's demarcations of the internal senses must be regarded as provisional, in need of revision, and inexact given the enormous range of nonhuman animals with diverse psychological abilities. Addressing this problem will require resolving a host of issues with respect to phenomenology, the sublimation of commonsense psychology into a theoretical psychological taxonomy, the relevance of double dissociations and other experimental evidence from neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience, and a more perspicuous ontological taxonomy for individuating or differentiating psychological powers.

28 Daniel De Haan, ‘Moral Perception and the Function of the Vis Cogitativa in Thomas Aquinas's Doctrine of Antecedent and Consequent Passions’, Documenti e studi sulla Tradizione filosofica medievale 25 (2014): 287–328 (=Moral Perception).

29 Hacker, The Passions, 127.

30 King, Peter, ‘Aquinas on the Passions’, in Aquinas's Moral Theory, ed. Mac Donald, Scott (Cornell University Press 1999), 101-132Google Scholar; De Haan, Daniel D., ‘Delectatio, Gaudium, Fruitio: Three Kinds of Pleasure for Three Kinds of Knowledge in Thomas Aquinas’, Quaestio: Journal of the History of Metaphysics 15 (2015): 241–250CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a rich contemporary account of passions, emotions, affections, and agitations, which also engages Aquinas, see Hacker, The Passions.

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32 ST, I-II, q. 1, a. 1.

33 ST, I-II, q. 6, aa. 1-2.

34 ST, I-II, q. 1, a. 2, ad 2; q. 6, a. 3; q. 17, a. 1, ad 2.

35 ST, I-II, q. 1, a. 1, ad 2; q. 17, aa. 5–6. Brock, Stephen, Action and Conduct: Thomas Aquinas and the Theory of Action (T&T Clark, 1998)Google Scholar.

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37 De Haan, Moral Perception.

38 ST, I-II, q. 1, a. 2; q. 6, a. 2; q. 9, a.1, ad 2; q. 10, a. 3, ad 3; q. 11, a. 2; q. 12, a. 5; q. 13, a. 2 (cf. ST, I, q. 83, a. 1; q. 103, a. 1, ad 3); q. 15, a. 2; q. 16, a. 2; q. 17, a. 2.

39 ST, I-II, q. 31, aa. 1-8.

40 ST, I-II, q. 22, aa. 1-3; q. 23, a. 1.

41 ST, I, q. 83, aa. 1-4; I-II, q. 1, aa. 1-2; q. 6, a. 1. Overindulgence in analysis is what leads to false dichotomies and problematically myopic queries like: Is Aquinas an intellectualist or voluntarist about free will? We actually need an even wider-angle lens than I have provided here if we are to understand the intelligibility of human actions. MacIntyre, After Virtue, ch. 15 (esp., 206-210).

42 ST, I-II, q. 1, a. 2; q. 6, a. 1, ad 2; q. 12, a. 5, ad 3.

43 Hearne, Vicki, Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name (Skyhorse Publishing, 2007) (esp. ch. 5 ‘Crazy Horses’)Google Scholar; Gaita, Raimond, The Philosopher's Dog (Routledge, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 ST, I, q. 79, a. 12.

45 Each of these phases of human action comprise cognitive-appetitive couplets, see Westberg, Daniel, Right Practical Reason: Aristotle, Action, and Prudence in Aquinas (OUP, 1994)Google Scholar; Stephen Brock, Action and Conduct.

46 ST, I-II, q. 6, a. 2; q. 11, a. 2; q. 12, a. 5, ad 3.

47 ST, I, q. 78, a. 4, ad 4.

48 ST, I-II, q. 15, a. 2, ad 1 et ad 3.

49 ST, I-II, q. 13, a. 2.

50 Sentencia libri De anima II, 13.

51 ST, I-II, q. 13, a. 2, obj. 3 et ad 3. In ST, I, q. 78, a. 4 Aquinas rejects attributing any form of quasi-syllogistic thinking to nonhuman animals.

52 Bermúdez, José Luis, Thinking without Words (Oxford University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. We also need not contort all animal behavior to fit the Procrustean bed of dual process and dual systems theories.

53 Taylor, Charles, The Explanation of Behaviour (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964)Google Scholar; Hutto, Folk Psychological Narratives. I should also note that, by adopting these distinctions from the middle path advanced in this essay, we can preserve the truth of MacIntyre's insightful account of purposeful nonhuman animal behavior, without employing his misleading ascription of “reasons for action” to nonhuman animals. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, ch. 6 ff.

54 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Thomistic Institute at Yale University and the Aquinas Seminar at Blackfriars, Oxford University. I am grateful to the extensive comments I received from participants in those seminars. I would especially like to thank Richard Conrad for his feedback on earlier iterations of this essay. The research for this article was supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation's Theology, Philosophy of Religion, and the Sciences project at the University of Cambridge.