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Full Idea
What constitutes the essential difference between man and animal? The most simple, general, and most widely held answer to this question is consciousness. Consciousness is given only in the case of a being to whom his species ...is an object of thought.
Gist of Idea
Consciousness is said to distinguish man from animals - consciousness of his own species
Source
Ludwig Feuerbach (Introduction of 'Essence of Christianity' [1841], I)
Book Ref
Feuerbach,Ludwig: 'The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings', ed/tr. Hanfi,Zawar [Anchor 1972], p.96
A Reaction
Rather speculative. Since other species cohabit and breed only with their fellow species members, one might have thought they were aware of them.
| 13779 | The natural offspring of a lion is called a 'lion' (but what about the offspring of a king?) [Plato] |
| 16663 | Things are limited by the species to certain modes of being [Olivi] |
| 19448 | Consciousness is said to distinguish man from animals - consciousness of his own species [Feuerbach] |
| 17050 | Tigers may lack all the properties we originally used to identify them [Kripke] |
| 17049 | 'Tiger' designates a species, and merely looking like the species is not enough [Kripke] |
| 17051 | The original concept of 'cat' comes from paradigmatic instances [Kripke] |
| 17372 | The higher categories are not natural kinds, so the Linnaean hierarchy should be given up [Devitt] |
| 17373 | Species pluralism says there are several good accounts of what a species is [Devitt] |
| 17369 | We name species as small to share properties, but large enough to yield generalisations [Devitt] |
| 17367 | Species are phenetic, biological, niche, or phylogenetic-cladistic [Devitt, by PG] |
| 17386 | The theory of evolution is mainly about species [Dupré] |
| 17383 | Species are the lowest-level classification in biology [Dupré] |
| 17366 | Virtually all modern views of speciation rest on relational rather than intrinsic features [Okasha] |