Combining Texts

Ideas for 'works', 'The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding' and 'Knowing One's Own Mind'

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2 ideas

18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 5. Rationality / c. Animal rationality
Aristotle and the Stoics denied rationality to animals, while Platonists affirmed it [Aristotle, by Sorabji]
     Full Idea: Aristotle, and also the Stoics, denied rationality to animals. …The Platonists, the Pythagoreans, and some more independent Aristotelians, did grant reason and intellect to animals.
     From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Richard Sorabji - Rationality 'Denial'
     A reaction: This is not the same as affirming or denying their consciousness. The debate depends on how rationality is conceived.
18. Thought / C. Content / 6. Broad Content
External identification doesn't mean external location, as with sunburn [Davidson, by Rowlands]
     Full Idea: Davidson observes that the inference from a thought being identified by a relation to something outside the head does not entail that the thought is not wholly in the head, just as sunburn is identified by external factors, but is still in the skin.
     From: report of Donald Davidson (Knowing One's Own Mind [1987]) by Mark Rowlands - Externalism Ch.8
     A reaction: Rowlands (an externalist) agrees, and this strikes me as correct, and it needs to be one of the fixed points in any assessment of externalism.