Don Quixote's Windmills

Abstract

Animal cognition and animal communication are fields of study that are immediately capable of evoking intellectual traditions dating from antiquity. They have also evoked theological debates since medieval Christianity, showing how entrapped we have been in anthropocentrism. It was Empedocles (495-439 BC) who first introduced the notion of the survival of the fittest, later popularized (while misrepresenting Darwin's concept of natural selection) by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) in his 'Principles of Biology' (1864), Aristotle (384-322 BC) who conceptualized all living things along a 'scala naturae', Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) who considered, in 'Leviathan' (1651), all natural life as nasty, brutish, and short, and René Descartes (1596-1650) who reinforced the view that humans are fundamentally distinct from the rest of living things because, according to him, humans can think and animals cannot. The ideas of Empedocles, Aristotle, and Descartes remained the foundations for thinking about animals well into the twentieth century.