http://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/339/Descartes.pdf
John Cottingham’s dissection of Descartes’ treatment of animals was interesting to me in that he played Devil’s Advocate and took the stance that perhaps Descartes was not as anti-animals as people made him out to be. He recaps the widely accepted view of Descartes’ thoughts as being the idea that animals are without feeling or awareness of any kind, but then opposes this view by breaking Descartes’ work into 7 theses. The 7 theses are that (1) animals are machines, (2) animals are automata, (3) animals do not think, (4) animals have no language, (5) animals have no self-consciousness, (6) animals have no consciousness, and (7) animals are totally without feeling. While Cottingham admits that theses 1-5 do represent Descartes’ beliefs and that there is evidence to back this up, he finds thesis 6 to be fuzzy and thesis 7 to be entirely without supporting evidence. Thesis 7, the idea that animals are completely without feeling, is Descartes’ “monstrous thesis” that everyone associates him with, yet Cottingham offers up the idea that perhaps Descartes’ beliefs were in fact not this extreme. I liked this article in that I was initially taken aback by how harsh Descartes’ view of animals was when he was referring to them as mere machines without their own thoughts, but Cottingham’s work made Descartes’ views seem less severe upon second glance.