I agree, totally different actions. — Moliere
Although vivisection dates from antiquity, early modern experimenters expanded the range of practices and epistemic motivations associated with it, displaying considerable technical skills and methodological awareness about the problems associated with the animals being alive and the issue of generalizing results to humans.
I wouldn't be surprised if the people inspired by Descartes did something along those lines. (though that's not the same as demonstration, either -- something about knowledge. it's hard to obtain sometimes!) — Moliere
Many practitioners expressed great discomfort at the suffering of the animals; however, many remained convinced that their investigations were not only indispensable from an epistemic standpoint but also had potential medical applications.
As a philosopher, Descartes surely ought to have been more resistant to fashionable cruelty of the leisured class of scientists active in his own time. His inclination to the contrary places him in the same category as reprehensible events of the 1660s, when thirty vivisections were conducted in the presence of assembled members of the Royal Society in London.
A well known early report of brutal Cartesian vivisectionists at the Port Royal School, in Paris, has aroused differences of interpretation. One commentary says the report “may not be trustworthy.” That account was written years after the events described. However, there are other reports of animal experiments in the late seventeenth century, along with implications that Cartesian mechanists made no attempt to minimise animal suffering, believing that this was an illusion (Boden 2006:72-3).
The Port Royal report describes dogs being nailed alive to boards for dissection. This was during the 1650s. The callous behaviour is very easy to credit, as the Jansenist milieu under discussion is known to have been influenced by Cartesian attitudes, via leading figures at the Port Royal School and related Abbey. Someone had taught the pupils a Cartesian approach to supposed automata. The report was included in the Memoires of Nicolas Fontaine (1625-1709), a contribution which is very difficult to ignore (on the Port Royal School, see Delforges 1985).
Vivisection increased substantially as a consequence of Cartesian doctrine, being avidly practised by the Royal Society. This organisation was founded by a group of scientists including Robert Boyle (1627-91) and Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Their crimes are on record, including the injection of poisons, ever since a favoured device of laboratory personnel. Dogs, sheep, and other animals were the victims. Hooke is known to have vivisected a dog in 1667, and in this respect was a virtual blood brother of Descartes.
Hooke’s prestigious colleague Robert Boyle was an ardent defender of vivisection, viewing critics as sentimentalists. How tough and supremely insensitive the empiricists were. The objectors were here viewed as “a discouraging impediment to the empire of man over the inferior creatures of God” (Boden 2006:73).
Here is a passage from the web page that calls into question Descartes’ participation in the torture of dogs. — Wayfarer
I am disappointed to learn about this aspect of Descartes’ character, but that doesn’t mean I want him struck from the history books. — Wayfarer
Understanding something of Descartes’ philosophy is important for understanding modern culture. — Wayfarer
I think it’s possible to be critical without being totally cynical. I am disappointed to learn about this aspect of Descartes’ character, but that doesn’t mean I want him struck from the history books. Understanding something of Descartes’ philosophy is important for understanding modern culture. But I agree, there’s plenty to be critical of. As that passage says, at the very least, Descartes ought to have known better, and many purported devotees of his ‘mechanist’ philosophy used it to justify enormous suffering.
(By way of antidote to the above, see this tear-jerker:
https://wapo.st/3Y1hqOb — Wayfarer
Here's what to me is a point in favor of Descartes - at least he was being consistent. — Agent Smith
I see the physic this relation of the modern rationalist being antagonized by the irrational, and the symbolic nature of a human bein violent towards a dog with the added layer of scientism, as an important message. — introbert
From John Cottingham's measured argument, we can conclude that not only for Descartes but philosophers today, feeling and sensation is not part of any dichotomy between animals and humans. — RussellA
Because this thread was initiated asking the question whether Descartes was an "evil genius", which can only be about what he meant or thought. — RussellA
He and his assistants would conduct public demonstrations in which they vivisected and tortured conscious animals -- often dogs. As the animal subjects writhed and cried out in apparent agony, Descartes would tell onlookers not to worry. The movements and sounds, he insisted, were no more than programmed responses. The animals were not really in any pain.
Descartes had a sophisticated understanding of animal training or animal conditioning (classical or Pavlovian conditioning). For example, he opines that by beating a dog half-a-dozen times while a violin is being played, one will have trained or conditioned the dog to whine and run away at the sound of a violin (Descartes a Mersenne. 18 mars 1630 (Letter to Mersenne) (AT I: 134)) — Descartes' Tests for (Animal) Mind
According to Descartes's analysis of this example, the shock of finding on a single occasion something loathsome in meat that a person has been eating with relish can somehow establish a firm association between this type of meat and the feeling of disgust or aversion occasioned by the revolting item. That is, a single disagreeable episode can create a new habit in the diner that displaces or overrides his former disposition to savor meat of the given sort.
"Before becoming a Cartesian, I was so soft that I could not even see a chicken being killed: but once I was convinced that animals had neither knowledge nor feeling, I thought of depopulating the dogs from the city where I was, to do anatomical dissections, where I worked myself, without having the slightest feeling of compassion."Avant que d’être Cartésien, j’étais si tendre, que je ne pouvais pas seulement voir tuer un poulet: mais depuis que je fus une fois persuadé que les bêtes n’avaient ni connaissance, ni sentiment, je pensai dépeupler de chiens la ville où j’étais, pour faire des dissections anatomiques, où je travaillais moi-même, sans avoir le moindre sentiment de compassion.
"Descartes left us no treatise on the animal, but he was an enthusiast for dissections and vivisections, who was accused, one day, of 'going through the villages to see pigs killed'. As if it were a crime, he replied, to be 'curious about anatomy'"Descartes ne nous a laissé aucun traité sur l'animal, mais cétait un fervent des dissections et des vivisections, qui s'est vu accusé, un jour, «d'aller par les villages pour voir tuer des pourceaux.»
Comme si c'était un crime, a-t-il répondu, d'être « curieux de l'anatomie». (À Mersenne, 13 nov. 1639, AT, II, p. 621) — La place de l’animal dans l’œuvre de Descartes
Descartes and his followers performed experiments in which they nailed animals by their paws onto boards and cut them open to reveal their beating hearts. They burned, scalded, and mutilated animals in every conceivable manner. When the animals reacted as though they were suffering pain, Descartes dismissed the reaction as no different from the sound of a machine that was functioning improperly. A crying dog, Descartes maintained, is no different from a whining gear that needs oil.
Well, I once made a rather careful observation of this phenomenon in fish, whose hearts after removal from the body go on beating for much longer than the heart of any terrestrial animal.
For this is disproved by a decisive experiment that I have seen done several times and did again today in the course of writing this letter. [Descartes describes at considerable length a protracted vivisection—cutting open a live rabbit in order to see how it heart responds to various changes. We can spare ourselves the details of this. Descartes concludes:] This experiment is fatal to Harvey’s view about the movement of the heart,
The striking usage of vivisection in the early modern period and its interaction with other techniques. — https://hpsc.indiana.edu/documents/faculty-articles/meli/dbmPaper_EarlyModernExperimentation.pdf
While some anatomists found the suffering of animals in artificial and cruel settings unbearable, many defended vivisection on the ground that it is permissible to treat animals the way we wish; paradoxically, Danish anatomist Nicolaus Steno did both.
They say that in movies, you can kill as many people as you'd like, but to murder an animal is unbearable for the viewer. — Hanover
They say that in movies, you can kill as many people as you'd like, but to murder an animal is unbearable for the viewer.
A little further reading reveals the suggestion that the previously-mentioned acts of 'hammering dogs to boards' was actually carried out not by Descartes but by pupils at a college influenced by Cartesian ideas. However the same source also notes that Descartes was interested in vivisection and anatomical examination of animals alive and dead. Another source says that the report about maltreatment of dogs was written long after the events and may not be trustworthy.
It seems to me that on further reading, the story about Descartes appalling treatment of dogs is apocryphal at best, but that he certainly was interested in vivisection, not least because of his theory that the mind and the body interacted via the pituitary gland.
But, as far as the story that opened this thread is concerned, unless someone has better information, I'm somewhat relieved to report that it probably is not true. — Wayfarer
Animals are machines.
Humans are animals.
Therefore, humans are machines. — Count Timothy von Icarus
This piece of text in the website is a quote, so I am not sure who he is quoting, if at all, but the quote references Clarke 2006, a book, not a primary source obviously. I was not planning to do any more source hunting, but Clarke 2006 is "Descartes: A Biography", I went to page 332 for the quote and the webpage is unsurprisingly dishonest, cutting out the book to make things seem other than they are. I will preface this by saying that the book does not give any source to the statement that follows, simply "iv. 555", which I will not bother to find out what it is:He even arranged [in 1646] for the slaughter of a pregnant cow so that he could examine the foetus at an early stage of its development. (Clarke 2006:332)
The animal was already dead, Descartes simply took the remains for investigation. Clarke quotes what seems to be a letter or note by Descartes, but I don't know what iv. 555 refers to.He even arranged for the slaughter of a pregnant cow so that he could examine the foetus at an early stage of its development. When he noticed that Dutch butchers often slaughtered pregnant cows, he took advantage of their carelessness to further his investigations: ‘I arranged for them to bring me more than a dozen wombs in which there were small calves, some as big as mice, others as big as rats, and others again like small dogs, in which I could observe many more things than was possible in the case of chickens because their organs are larger and more visible’ (iv. 555).
This excerpt for me comes off as strangely confusing. — Lionino
I've just learned the René Descartes used to conduct horrific public vivisection of dogs, literally flaying them alive and nailing them to boards, to 'demonstrate' his conviction that animals are incapable of suffering, due to not being rational. — Wayfarer
He bent some little way to accord animals sensation and emotion, but still considered it legitimate for humans to use them like objects.Descartes famously thought that animals were merely ‘mechanisms’ or ‘automata’ – basically, complex physical machines without experiences – and that as a result, they were the same type of thing as less complex machines like cuckoo clocks or watches. He believed this because he thought that thoughts and minds are properties of an immaterial soul; thus, humans have subjective experience only because they have immaterial souls inhering in their physical bodies. However animals, reasoned Descartes, show no signs of being inhabited by rational souls: they don’t speak or philosophise, and so (as far as we can tell) they lack souls, and minds.
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