In this lecture, Professor Adamson will focus on a skeptical argument stating that animals have a different perspective on the world from humans. Since there is no reason to prefer the human perspective on the world to animal perspectives, one should suspend judgment about the veracity of the human perspective. Obviously this argument needs a lot of filling out before it can be evaluated. To undertake this task, the lecture will begin from a resonant passage in the Taoist classic, the Zhuangzi, before examining in more detail the skeptical mode from animals in Sextus Empiricus and similar material in Montaigne. The lecture then turns to an epistle from the Islamic “Brethren of Purity,” who imagined animals bringing a court case against humans.
Peter Adamson is Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He is the author of Al-Kindī and Al-Razī in the series “Great Medieval Thinkers” from Oxford University Press, and has edited or co-edited numerous books, including The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy and Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays. He is also the host of the History of Philosophy podcast, which appears as a series of books with Oxford University Press.
