St Thomas Aquinas And St. Descartes

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1. St. Thomas Aquinas is known for his faith and reasoning. St. Thomas Aquinas was declared a saint in 1323, but died in 1274. During this same time period, religion was still a prominent concept. The Crusades were happening at this time, and the push for Christianity was being enforced everywhere. St. Thomas Aquinas was a Catholic Priest and many of this teachings and concepts are still taught within the Church.
Catholic theology teaches that the World belongs to man in Genesis 1:28 it says, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth”. This is always taught to every person in Catholic school and within the …show more content…

Descartes uses two main arguments to distinguish the differences between human and animals. Animals are not as intelligent as humans are and cannot communicate as well. He states, “have less reason than men, but that they have none at all, since it is clear that very little is required in order to be able to talk,” (15 Descartes). With both of these concepts, he believes animals are machines.
Humans have also been proven to be animals. We are not separate from the natural functions of the world, but we like to think we are. What we do does have an effect on the future. At the time of Descartes life, Christianity influenced most people and a lack of sciences made people not understand fully the future consequences. I can see why Descartes would believe that animals are machines, but for modern times and our increase in technology his philosophy cannot be fully supportive.
3. People today always humanize non human beings. Whenever you name your pet, you make it more human. However, cattle on farms are numbered. We choose what we want to humanize, and put more value on animals we have humanized. Your pet you would no longer see as a resource with a name like Ringo or Grizzly, but 157 is who is going to be your steak next week. A harsh, but true reality. We do it to “the prevention of human pain than we do for preventing such things as freedom infringements, ad have been more through in our anthropomorphic transference,” (Guthrie 224). Guthrie believes that through anthropomorphic …show more content…

Free-range chicken is not truly free range. When we buy chicken that we know is non-organic, we have an idea of how that chicken came to be. A truly free-range chicken would be a chicken that feeds off of bugs and the earth around it. The chicken you buy at an organic food store is not really organic. They are fed organic feed, and given a certain area to walk. Organic is advertised as being “all natural”. We have no qualifications to what is “all natural”. How can we have something truly organic with in our agricultural system? With the amount our industry is growing we do not have enough time to be organic. In order to make it profitable, we have to industrialize it. Being apart of our society, the only way to have a free-range chicken is within a personal farm then building the farm

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