Moreover, if infants have immortal souls, why shouldn’t chimpanzees have them too?ĭespite such obvious paradoxes and ambiguities, there still remained many philosophical doctrines striving to give a simplistic definition of what it meant to be a human, long after Darwin’s ideas came out.
Chimpanzees, we now know, are much smarter than infants, so denying reason to the former means denying it to the latter as well. After Charles Darwin, however, it became impossible to think like this, as his theory of evolution forever changed the relationship between humans and animals, and irreversibly challenged our exceptionality and supposed dualistic nature. In the early 17th century, René Descartes argued that only humans possess minds, and about a century and a half later, Immanuel Kant – unifying several previous intellectual traditions – defined humans as animals endowed with the capacity of reason. For Christian philosophers, humans were inherently sinful, godlike creatures blessed with the unique ability to form a relationship with God. For Aristotle, being a human meant having a sense of good and evil, an appropriate end or goal, and a desire to belong in a community. The question of what it means to be human has been debated by philosophers ever since antiquity.įor Plato, a human being was an “upright, featherless biped with broad, flat nails,” differentiated from other animals by having a thirst for knowledge and an immortal soul.
Get ready to learn more about their philosophical views, as well as why they still matter. “The Ethics of Ambiguity” is the second major non-fiction work by Simone de Beauvoir, a French intellectual who was – together with her lifelong romantic partner Jean-Paul Sartre – one of the leading existentialist thinkers of post-war Europe.
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