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Foundations of Human and Animal Sensory Awareness: Descartes and Willis

  • Deborah Brown
  • Brian Key

In arguing against the likelihood of consciousness in non-human animals, Descartes advances a slippery slope argument that if thought were attributed to any one animal, it would have to be attributed to all, which is absurd. This paper examines the foundations of Thomas Willis’ comparative neuroanatomy against the background of Descartes’ slippery slope argument against animal consciousness. Inspired by Gassendi’s ideas about the corporeal soul, Thomas Willis distinguished between neural circuitry responsible for reflex behaviour and that responsible for cognitively or consciously mediated behaviour. This afforded Willis a non-arbitrary basis for distinguishing between animals with thought and consciousness and those without, a methodology which retains currency for neuroscience today.

  • Keywords:
  • René Descartes,
  • Thomas Willis,
  • consciousness,
  • animal soul,
  • structure-determines-function principle,
  • immortality,
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Deborah Brown

University of Queensland, Australia - ORCID: 0000-0001-5707-7605

Brian Key

University of Queensland, Australia - ORCID: 0000-0002-1150-3848

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  • Pagine: 81-99

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Informazioni sul capitolo

Titolo del capitolo

Foundations of Human and Animal Sensory Awareness: Descartes and Willis

Autori

Deborah Brown, Brian Key

Lingua

English

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-0169-8.06

Opera sottoposta a peer review

Anno di pubblicazione

2023

Copyright

© 2023 Author(s)

Licenza d'uso

CC BY 4.0

Licenza dei metadati

CC0 1.0

Informazioni bibliografiche

Titolo del libro

Reading Descartes

Sottotitolo del libro

Consciousness, Body, and Reasoning

Curatori

Andrea Strazzoni, Marco Sgarbi

Opera sottoposta a peer review

Numero di pagine

206

Anno di pubblicazione

2023

Copyright

© 2023 Author(s)

Licenza d'uso

CC BY 4.0

Licenza dei metadati

CC0 1.0

Editore

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-0169-8

ISBN Print

979-12-215-0168-1

eISBN (pdf)

979-12-215-0169-8

eISBN (epub)

979-12-215-0170-4

Collana

Knowledge and its Histories

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3035-5974

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3035-5923

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