Medieval University Ethology and the Upper Limits of Animal Cognition

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Giving a paper in Croatia as part of the “Becoming Axolotl: Empathy, Simulation, and Embodiment in Medieval Narratives” event.

Here it is (adapted from Chapter 1 of what I hope is my next book):

My talk today is about the efforts by medieval university thinkers to think about, and put a cap on, animal cognition. They were writing in an intellectual environment that held that humans were fundamentally the “rational, mortal animal”: animal because we possess a soul – anima in Latin – mortal, because we are not purely spiritual beings, and rational, as they developed this fundamental idea, because we have a special kind of soul. The “rational” soul was given to us miraculously in the womb at the point when we were shaped appropriately to receive it – some 40 days for boys, longer for girls; it had to be miraculous rather than a product of bodily reproduction and growth because it had to be able to live forever, and because it had to cognize in ways that were held to be unique to the human animal: abstractly and universally, forms of thought that did not require sensory input, that could step back from immediate circumstances, that could see things from a distant, non-subjective viewpoint, and so on.

Such ideas of course were operational prior to the thirteenth century. But it is in this later period, when Latin translations of Aristotle’s De Anima became a central text of university training, that animal cognition became an object of sustained and systematic interest.[1] Newly systematic thought did not, however, necessarily result in new conclusions. On the question of animal rationality, what chiefly differed from what came before is that the thinkers developed professionally in an environment of shared intellectual endeavor where they were all in communication with one another’s ideas. Although they differed on many things, not least of their professional affiliations (theologians or arts faculty), or their order (the “Aristotelian” Dominicans vs the “Augustinian” Franciscans),[2] all shared a bedrock belief that only humans had a rational soul, and that therefore only humans could truly reason. All recognized wide ranges of quasi-rational capacities in nonhuman animals, with an enthusiasm that might impress even modern ethology, but underlying all that recognition is an unwavering commitment to preserving reason as a capacity proper only to humans and rational spiritual beings.

Their intellectual output did not, that is, aim to find new truths but rather to build received truths better supports. Frequently considered problems included the dog that, once beaten with a stick, cringes from all brandished sticks, as if it had developed its own universal concept of “stickiness,”[3] or why all chicken fear foxes, or sheep wolves, even if they have never encountered any before. Roger Bacon considered a cat that gets at fish in a tank by removing its cork, leaving the fish helpless, gasping, and flopping.[4] Albert the Great had heard of wolves perfecting their pig-snatching technique by practicing with pig-sized logs.[5] Thinkers wondered too about the prudence of ants that store food for the winter.[6] They allowed that cranes, cows, and sheep all elected leaders, that they were, in other words, political animals.[7] They admired the complexity of birds’ nests and spiderwebs. None of these ethological observations should be taken as threats to human difference but rather as elements in a kind of intellectual game, whose rules required players to account for animal behavior in all its variety without using any forbidden explanations, without, that is, relying on free choice of the will, nonsensory cognition, the generation of universal categories, or any other capacity held to be unique to rational beings: the clever cat, the conceptual dog, the anxious chicken and sheep, architectural spiders and birds, all of them, it had to be said, thought only with their sensitive soul, only with a soul, that is, whose operations never surmounted the body and its sensations.

The game was not necessarily an easy one. Consider this thought experiment by Thomas de Bailly, an early fourteenth-century chancellor of the University of Paris. He writes about a dog that follows a robber to a very remote place and gets the right man. The loyalty and cleverness of dogs was proverbial, their list of accomplishments standardized by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History and repeated in works as varied as Ambrose’s Hexameron and Gaston Phébus’s Livre de chasse. Thomas was speaking to an audience that thought they knew their dogs. His goal is to demonstrate that the dog found the robber by using only his senses. Per usual, he relies chiefly on existing authorities in natural philosophy to do his thinking for him. Aristotle, Thomas explains, holds that only humans can think; even elephants, the most tractable and sagacious of wild animals, lack any intellectual capacity. And while humans and animals may both have memory, Avicenna and Averroes –and, he might have added, Augustine, in De Trinitate 12 – all hold that only humans conjoin memory with intellect, which allows them to recall and analyze things long after they have faded from the senses. And so on, with increasingly subtle, yet still familiar, taxonomies of psychological faculties, until Thomas arrives at his conclusion: yes, a dog might catch a thief far from the scene of the crime, but it does this purely through its sensory capacities. The dog might sense the thief’s fear or some other violent passion, or the dog might discover that the thief shares an odor with the air of the place where the theft happened. Nothing, however, other than sensory knowledge enables the dog’s success. It had drawn and can draw no logical conclusions. For, as Thomas explained almost as soon as he started down this familiar path, if a dog were to have a form of thinking that surpassed sensory powers, it would transcend its own species and “esset homo” (be a human), a conclusion he at once cauterizes with a definitive “quod est inconveniens” (that would be absurd).[8] The fourteenth-century Oxford philosopher Adam de Wodeham (d. 1358) is just as sharp on the question of dogs: they cannot be recognized as having rational judgments, not because they lack any specific kind of behavior or mode of expression, but because otherwise “I do not see why they should not be called rational animals.”[9] That would not do: for the professional thinkers to relax their intellectual policy on dogs, among other beasts, would leave most of their doctrine in shambles.

In short, so long as a sensory cause could be produced, animal deliberation could and had to be understood as irrational. Though sheep flee all wolves, they cannot be allowed any abstract notion of lupinity; instead, as Aquinas explains, what must drive them is a subrational form of “natural judgement,” called “estimation,” that allows them to perceive the wolf’s harmful intention immediately.[10] They will never think of the wolf in the abstract, or even wonder to themselves whether they should have been braver. Since a dog can come to fear all sticks, certain kinds of generalization must be possible, explains Roger Bacon, “by power of the sensory soul,”[11] an allowance that takes us right up to the edge of reason. When ants store grain against the winter, what they did was, according to Albert the Great, only a “sort of prudence.”[12] While a dog with a foot caught in a trap might gnaw off its paw to save itself, and therefore has awareness of the distinction of its self from its paw – self-awareness that is – it does not have, insists the Franciscan Peter John Olivi, awareness of awareness itself.[13] And while architectural animals like birds and spiders and bees could do good design, they could never do any work but what they already inherently knew how to do: aesthetic innovation was unique to the human animal.[14] The clever cat and other syllogistic animals required some further intellectual strain, evident in explanatory phrases scattered throughout university-trained thought like “rational distinguishing” (Raoul Ardent),[15] “a sensitive appetite” (John Buridan and Duns Scotus), a “natural inclination” (Aquinas), a “likeness of reason” (Aquinas), “power of cogitation” (Roger Bacon), or even “some likeness of free choice” (Aquinas).[16] Animals are allowed to creep perilously close to reason’s border, but only ever asymptotically. The content of the debates and their evidence varied, but never the conclusions: many animals could think – that was indisputable – and often in quite complicated ways, but no animal could reason.[17]

We can take all this material as anticipating Morgan’s Canon, named for Conwy Lloyd Morgan’s 1894 observation that “in no case is an animal activity to be interpreted as the outcome of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be fairly interpreted as the outcome of one that stands lower in the psychological scale.”[18] Notably, Morgan formulates his ethological Occam’s Razor with an example as apt for a medieval university as for his English imperial context. As he plays fetch, Morgan observes that his dog seems to decide which end of the object would be easiest to grasp. But has it reasoned? Morgan says that we can assume only that the dog “became aware in a practical way of how best to deal with the stick.” Staying well clear of verbs like “recognized” or “concluded,” Morgan says the least he can with “became aware.” Modern science might call Morgan’s canon a principle of deflation, or parsimony, and would hold it up as a laudable bulwark against superstition. Better science follows the path of what Simon Fitzpatrick termed “evidentialism,” which is a kind of analytical agnosticism that refuses to default to explanations either cognitively higher or lower than what is expected. For Morgan’s Canon, as Helen Steward says, now “itself the danger to good science,”[19] fails thinking itself because of its paradigmatic exclusion of animals from reasoning, and its implicit inclusion of humans within it: what is this automatism but an instinctual activity, done in the service not of thought but a regulated pattern, to ensure the dog does not tread too close to Morgan’s human confidence.

In closing, let me observe that such highly skeptical and defensive methods differ sharply from the straightforwardly observational methods used by university thinkers to handle questions of animal emotions. Likely developing work by the Franciscan and his fellow Parisian academic Jean de la Rochelle, Aquinas divided the passions from the affections: the latter are specific to rational beings, while the former can be experienced by animals too.[20] Somewhat confusingly, many of the passions and affections bear the same name (for example, love, desire, and hope), but their kind of existence varies. Aquinas wants the passions to be ontologically good and potentially morally neutral, because they are part of God’s original creation, while the affections, arising only where reason is, can be either vicious or virtuous, as can anything enacted through reason. So, when Aquinas takes up the question of “Whether hope is in dumb animals,”[21] he lets himself answer yes in a way he would never have allowed himself had the question been about whether reason is in “dumb animals.” For “the internal passions of animals can be gathered from their outward movements: from which it is clear that hope is in dumb animals.” A dog, he writes, will chase only those birds it might be able to capture, not those it sees in the far distance: for Aquinas, that suffices as evidence of animal hope. For certain questions, university thinkers like Aquinas allowed themselves to surmise nonhuman cognitive states straightforwardly from animal comportment. The hope of an apparently hopeful dog could be something other than a ruse or mirage, something quite unlike the clever cat, because hope can be a passion, and passions can be found in creatures without a rational soul. This is evidentialism, allowed here and only here because nonhuman hope, desire, and love made no trouble for human rational and moral uniqueness.

A long snout, four legs, fur and a wet nose—if dogs could universalize or otherwise think without their bodies, none of this dogginess would stand in the way of their being human. We are what we are not because we are featherless bipeds but because we alone are the mortal life that conceptualizes and because concepts are incorporeal. Keeping the dogs at the door, stuck in the fleshy world, and letting them get no further required arguments both detailed and flimsy, for the point was just to keep the game of keep-away going. As Derrida observes in his late work on animals, the list of qualities supposed to be proper to human beings and denied animals “n’est jamais close,” can never be finished.[22] Whenever animals seem to be acting human the game requires that the definition of what counts as rational activity shifts slightly, with jealous defensiveness, to enclose humans on the inside, and to keep animals out.

It may be too much to call the logic of these scholars “anxious”[23]: their confidence about human supremacy never wavers, nor have I found any who doubted, for example, whether humans themselves are in fact able to think of a concept liberated from its sensory, embodied situation, a matter well worth doubting for anyone who approaches the question honestly. Difficult cases from natural history are, for them, not to be avoided but rather played with as further opportunities to dazzle their colleagues with their solutions. Not anxious, then, but defensive, in the sense of defending goals every bit as fixed as those that frame either end of a soccer field / football pitch. For the players, no animal action – no deliberating over choices, no development of a conceptual understanding of an object, no speech even – could ever win them recognition as a reasonable creature. Any animal able to think its way into having a rational soul would break the rules of human uniqueness. To recognize them as creatures like us would be to recognize them not only as living vulnerable things, possessed by the need to sleep and eat and, as a species, the imperative of reproduction, but also as things deserving a special dignity, precisely because, were they rational, like us, they would also be immortal, deserving the care, concern, and judgment that can rightly be directed only to creatures destined for eternity.[24] Animals can be allowed to think; they can be allowed to think with surprising cleverness, far more cleverness, in fact, than Morgan was willing to grant his dog; they could be allowed to hope even; but they could never think their way past the guardians of human dignity.

We tend to think of reason as operating through an impersonal framework of supposedly objective, propositional, logically interlinked statements. It must, though, be recognized as a social claim, dependent less, or at least not only, on the content of the propositions, than on the more fundamental decision to recognize, or not, a being as either reasonable or mechanistic, or, to put that last term another way, as merely instinctual. In the material I have talked about today, animals could not be rational not because they could not think but because it would not do for them to be rational. Animals were held – as animalized people often are – to be only local, parochial, cut off from disembodied truth. There was nothing they could do, no way they could express themselves, that could convince anyone otherwise who already considered themselves a universal subject. At least, such was the case for the professional thinkers, these paragons of reason.

Thank you.

  1. For fundamental treatments, Bernard G. Dod, “Aristoteles Latinus,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600, ed. Eleonore Stump et al. (Cambridge University Press, 1982), and C. H. Lohr, “The Medieval Interpretation of Aristotle,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600, ed. Anthony Kenny et al. (Cambridge University Press, 1982). While some Aristotle was translated into Latin from Arabic (De Caelo, the De Animalibus material, and Metaphysics among them), most was done directly from Greek: Dod, “Aristoteles Latinus,” 52. The first translation of De Anima, by James of Venice, is done before 1150; Michael Scot does another between 1220-35; and William of Moerbeke, along with the entire known Aristotelian corpus, one more, before his death in 1268. ↑
  2. Like any long-handy division, these oppositions have been complicated: see for example Eileen Sweeney, “Rewriting the Narrative of Scripture: 12th-Century Debates Over Reason and Theological Form,” Medieval Philosophy & Theology 3, no. 1 (1993): 1–34. Luca Bianchi and Eugenio Randi, Vérités dissonantes : Aristote à la fin du Moyen Âge (Cerf, 1993), 7, attest to some 1000 references to Aristotle in the works of the Franciscan Bonaventure. As Henrik Lagerlund, “Introduction: The Mind/Body Problem and Late Medieval Conceptions of the Soul,” in Forming the Mind: Essays on the Internal Senses and the Mind/Body Problem from Avicenna to the Medical Enlightenment, ed. Henrik Lagerlund (Springer, 2007), 5, observes, university scholars could blithely mix references to (the somewhat Neo-Platonic) Augustine with references to Aristotle because Muslim and Jewish commentators had already effected a rapprochement between the two classical thinkers. As difficult a meal as Aristotle could be even for supervised doctrinal Christianity, he had come to the university, as it were, already partly predigested. ↑
  3. Avicenna and Aquinas, in Anselm Oelze, Animal Rationality: Later Medieval Theories 1250-1350 (Brill, 2018), 63–66. ↑
  4. Oelze, Animal Rationality, 143–45. ↑
  5. Albertus Magnus, De Animalibus Libri XXVI, ed. Hermann Stadler (Aschendorff, 1916), 518. ↑
  6. Oelze, Animal Rationality, 178–82. ↑
  7. Juhana Toivanen, “‘Like Ants in a Colony We Do Our Share’: Political Animals in Medieval Philosophy,” in State and Nature: Studies in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Christof Rapp (De Gruyter, 2021). ↑
  8. Thomas de Bailly, Quodlibets, ed. Palémon Glorieux (J. Vrin, 1960), 258–60. Whether these words are precisely Thomas’s is an open question. Records of disputations bearing the name of a university master might well be the work of a team, as the medieval master might be thought of, as Louis-Jacques Bataillon observed, “un peu comme le peintre de la Renaissance dans son atelier” (a little like the Renaissance painter in his workshop), guiding the hands of assistants: quoted in Bianchi and Randi, Vérités dissonantes, 21. ↑
  9. Quoted from Oelze, Animal Rationality, 221. “Et tunc non video quare non debeant animalia rationalia appellari.” ↑
  10. Ian P. Wei, Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary Between Humans and Animals (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 167. The diffusion point for the sheep and wolves thought experiment is Avicenna’s Liber de anima: for discussion and further examples, Oelze, Animal Rationality, 34–35, the thirteenth-century De anima of John Blund (discussed in Peter G. Sobol, “The Shadow of Reason: Explanations of Intelligent Animal Behavior in the Thirteenth Century,” in The Medieval World of Nature: A Book of Essays, ed. Joyce E. Salisbury (Garland, 1993), 113–14), in Albert the Great, Jörg Alejandro Tellkamp, “Aping Logic? Albert the Great on Animal Mind and Action,” in Subjectivity and Selfhood in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Jari Kaukua and Tomas Ekenberg (Spring, 2016), and Dominik Perler, “Why Is the Sheep Afraid of the Wolf? Medieval Debates on Animal Passions,” in Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Martin Pickavé and Lisa Shapiro (Oxford University Press, 2012), which, at 38, quotes a counterargument from Duns Scotus about whether a sheep would flee its own lamb if the lamb’s appearance were miraculously changed into that of a wolf (the answer: yes, despite the absence of harmful intention, indicating the inadequacy of estimation as an explanation). ↑
  11. In his Perspectiva, quoted in Juhana Toivanen, “Marking the Boundaries: Animals in Medieval Latin Philosophy,” in Animals: A History, ed. Peter Adamson and G. Fay Edwards (Oxford University Press, 2018), 140. ↑
  12. Quoted in Wei, Thinking about Animals, 156. ↑
  13. Mikko Yrjönsuuri, “Perceiving One’s Own Body,” in Theories of Perception in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Pekka Kärkkäinen and Simo Knuuttila (2008), 113. ↑
  14. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles: Book Two: Creation, trans. J. F. Anderson (University of Notre Dame, 1956)., 267, q. 82, “That the Souls of Brute Animals are Not Immortal,” art. 2. ↑
  15. A. V. C. Schmidt, “Langland and Scholastic Philosophy,” Medium Ævum 38, no. 2 (1969): 146. ↑
  16. For the quotations from Buridan, Scotus, Aquinas, Bacon, and again Aquinas, see Oelze, Animal Rationality., 90, 139, 135, 145, and 110, barring “likeness of reason,” from De veritate q. 24, art. 2, quoted in Perler, “Animal Passions,” 41. ↑
  17. By contrast, much more generously than me, Ariane Economos, “The Expansion of the Boundaries of the Rational in Robert Grosseteste and Hugh of St. Victor,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 3, no. 1 (2015): 1–8, reads these sorts of phrases as evidence of scholastics extending to animals a limited form of rationality. Absent any medieval extension to animals of a soul free from material causes, Economos’s claim, and those like it, strikes me as unwarranted. Toivanen, “Marking the Boundaries” is a fair-minded assessment of both the complexities and the limits of nonhuman animal cognition and moral significance in professional medieval thought. ↑
  18. Lloyd Morgan, An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, 2nd ed. (Walter Scott, 1903), 241. My appreciation to Oelze, Animal Rationality for introducing me to Morgan. ↑
  19. Helen Steward, “Morgan’s Canon: Animal Psychology in the Twentieth Century and Beyond,” in Animals: A History, ed. Peter Adamson and G. Fay Edwards (Oxford University Press, 2018), 298. The Fitzgerald quotation also comes from Steward. For a superb sustained challenge to deflationary ethology, Vinciane Despret, What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?, trans. Brett Buchanan (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). ↑
  20. Artur Andrzejuk, “The Problem of Affectiones in the Texts of Thomas Aquinas,” Rocznik Tomistyczny 11 (2022): 181–92. Other guides to Aquinas on emotions include Matthew R. Boulter, “Aquinas on Anger,” in Righteous Indignation: Christian Philosophical and Theological Perspectives on Anger, ed. Gregory L. Bock and Court D. Lewis (Fortress Academic, 2021); Stephen Loughlin, “Similarities and Differences Between Human and Animal Emotion in Aquinas’s Thought,” The Thomist 65, no. 1 (2001): 45–65; Robert Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of Summa Theologiae, 1a2ae 22–48 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 268–86. Especially useful: Henrik Lagerlund, “The Systematization of the Passions in the Thirteenth Century,” in Philosophy of Mind in the Early and High Middle Ages, vol. 2, ed. Margaret Cameron, The History of the Philosophy of Mind (Routledge, 2018). ↑
  21. ST I-II, Q. 40, A. 3. ↑
  22. L’animal que donc je suis (Galilée, 2006), 19. The English translation does this as “nonfinite,” which is elegant, but also not quite what Derrida wrote: The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (Fordham University Press, 2008), 5. ↑
  23. Wei, Thinking about Animals, 202, whose comments on anxiety may well have been (justifiably) directed at some of my own earlier work. ↑
  24. See for example Aquinas ST II-II, Q. 35, A. 3, “Whether irrational creatures also ought to be loved out of charity?” He answers no, “for charity is based on the fellowship of everlasting happiness, to which the irrational creature cannot attain. Therefore we cannot have the friendship of charity towards an irrational creature.” ↑
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