ANIMAL | Complete Guide to Animal Nature: Adler's Syntopicon - Western Philosophy & Metaphysics!

Описание: The Animal essay in Mortimer Adler’s Syntopicon offers a systematic map of how Western philosophers, theologians, and scientists have interpreted animal life, using the Syntopicon’s topical method to coordinate sources from Aristotle to modern biology.

It begins with general theories of the “animal soul,” exploring sensation, memory, imagination, and appetite as distinctive yet graded capacities across species. Subsequent sections treat classification, anatomy, and physiology, including skeletal and visceral structures, circulation, and the nervous system, as foundations for explaining locomotion, growth, and internal motion.

The essay then turns to generation and reproduction, contrasting creation and evolution, sexual and asexual reproduction, and theories of heredity, while also examining habitat, geographical distribution, and ecological adaptation. Throughout, the topic of Animal intersects with debates about whether animals are mere automata, beings with intrinsic purposes, or members of a moral community, clarifying the human–animal divide that appears in related essays such as Man and Mind. This makes the essay a valuable resource for courses in philosophy of biology, ethics, and intellectual history.

• The structure of animal life: soul, sensation, and movement
• The essay synthesizes doctrines on the “animal soul,” treating sensitivity, memory, imagination, and appetite as key to understanding instinct and behavior.
• It compares voluntary and involuntary motion, internal circulation, and external locomotion to distinguish animal life from both plants and inanimate nature.
• Classification, anatomy, and the scale of beings
• Adler’s outline highlights competing schemes for classifying animals and the search for structural and functional analogies across classes and species.


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