Reasoning within Animals

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Rene Descartes and David Hume lived in two completely different time periods, yet they shared interest in some of the same philosophical categories. Could animals reason? How did humans expand their knowledge compared to animals? Questions like these were answered both by Descartes and Hume even though they had two opposing views. Descartes was the first to address the questions about animal instincts, and later on Hume set out to refute some of his ideas.
Rene Descartes views humans and animals on completely separate levels. He claims that animals do not possess intelligence and only act through their nature. While humans can perform a multitude of tasks by reasoning, animals can only carry out tasks where nature has given them the skills to do so. One of Descartes’ main arguments about animal’s inability to reason is that they are unable to communicate. If animals are born with the same general organ structure as humans, what’s stopping them from communicating with us? To Descartes, it’s their lack of intelligence. Sure parrots and some other animals can mimic human sounds and words, but they lack the ability to think about what they are saying.
Another one of Descartes arguments supporting the separation of humans and animals is that if machines were created to resemble and act like animals, there is no way we would be able to tell them from the real thing. Unlike the animals though, a machine created to resemble a human could never pass off as real. According to Descartes, it would be impossible to get the machine to react to other humans in an appropriate way. Human conversations are too complicated for machines to understand and interact properly without flaw. This is what separates humans from animals. Even the dumbest ma...

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... and wrong. While Descartes believes that all bad things that happen were actually good if we could just see the bigger picture, Hume says this does not matter. The human and animal mind is not created to think of the bigger picture, it is only able to think about what is right in front of it. So in this aspect, humans and animals are both able to perceive what is right and wrong, therefore supporting Hume’s idea that humans and animals aren’t so different.
Despite having polar opposite views, Rene Descartes and David Hume were both very prominent philosophers of their time. They both contemplated the ideas of reasoning within animals and sought to find the truth about the acquisition of knowledge. Both sides had valid points about whether animals can reason, and it really leaves it up to the individual to decide whether animals have the ability to reason or not.

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