Stephen T. Newmyer - The Animal and the Human in Ancient and Modern Thought: The ‘Man Alone of Animals’ Concept

The Animal and the Human in Ancient and Modern Thought

This is the first book-length study of the man alone of animals topos in classical literature, not restricting its analysis to Greco-Roman claims of humans intellectual uniqueness, but including classical assertions of their physiological and emotional uniqueness. It supplements this analysis of ancient manifestations with an examination of how the commonplace survives and has been restated, transformed and extended in contemporary ethological literature and in the literature of the animal rights and animal welfare movements. Author Stephen T. Newmyer demonstrates that the anthropocentrism detected in Greek applications of the man alone of animals topos is not only alive and well in many facets of the current debate on humananimal relations, but that combating its negative effects is a stated aim of some modern philosophers and activists.

Stephen T. Newmyer is Professor in the Department of Classics at Duquesne University, USA. He is author of several books and articles, most recently Animals, Rights, and Reason in Plutarch and Modern Ethics (Routledge, 2006) and Animals in Greek and Roman Thought: A Sourcebook (Routledge, 2011).

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The Animal and the Human in
Ancient and Modern Thought

The Man Alone of Animals Concept

Stephen T. Newmyer

First published 2017
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2017 Stephen T. Newmyer

The right of Stephen T. Newmyer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN: 978-0-415-83734-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-37990-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman
by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

For Sophie

gentle loving Other

Acknowledgements

My thanks are due to Lizzi Thomasson at Routledge for her unfailing patience and good humor with my numerous small queries during the composition of this volume. The keen eye of Jane Olorenshaw rescued me from more embarrassing errors that I would like to admit to, and in more than one language.

I am grateful to the Administration of Duquesne University for granting me a sabbatical leave in 2014 that allowed me to devote my full attention to this project.

Contents

As early as the eighth century bce , Greek philosophers speculated on the nature of the human animal and on humans relationship to other animals. Enumerations of specific examples of human uniqueness that occur in Greek authors, Renehan argues, so often employed the verbal formula man alone of animals to distinguish the nature of man from that of other animal species that the phrase itself became a clich in Greek and eventually in Roman philosophical and scientific literature.

The vast majority of the man alone of animals claims examined in Renehans study pertain to aspects of mans intellectual make-up in his status as a rational creature: man alone of animals, it was variously claimed, has reason, has memory, has beliefs, has an articulate language, has a self-image and so on. In addition, Renehan devotes brief attention to what he calls anatomical and physiological features which are peculiar to man alone of animals. A third type of the man alone of animals claim advanced by Greek authors, that which pertains to mans emotional dimension, scarcely figures in Renehans analysis. Nor does he take note of the small but vocal group of ancient thinkers who raised objections to claims of the man alone of animals type, whether made in connection with mans intellectual, physiological or emotional properties, and who maintained that differences between human beings and other animals should be viewed in at least some cases not as a matter of all or nothing, but rather as a question of degree, and that such differences may best be considered quantitative rather than qualitative in nature.

Particularly noteworthy, in discussion of the afterlife of this ancient verbal formula, is the striking degree to which classical arguments and examples resurface in twenty-first-century philosophical and scientific discourse relating to humananimal interactions. Attention to modern applications of the man alone of animals formula has more than mere antiquarian interest. It is scarcely an exaggeration to state that two millennia of disregard for and maltreatment of non-human animals by human beings have been influenced and often justified by appeals to assertions of the man alone of animals type by proponents of an aggressive faith in what is often labeled human exceptionalism, and to maintain that the work of some animal advocates in various disciplines has in recent decades been inspired in part by a desire to combat the negative effects of this mindset upon the lives of non-human species.