Are Animals Intelligent? | Marie George
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 14 December 2018
⏱️ 56 minutes
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Summary
This lecture was offered at MIT on October 25th as the 2nd part of a series of lectures on "The Distinctiveness of Human Intelligence."
For more information about upcoming TI events, check out: thomisticinstitute.org/events-1/
Speaker Bio:
Marie George has been a member of the Philosophy Department of St. John's University since 1988. Professor George is an Aristotelian-Thomist whose interests lie primarily in the areas of philosophy of nature and philosophy of science. She has received several awards from the John Templeton foundation for her work in science and religion, and in 2007 she received a grant from the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) for an interdisciplinary project entitled: “The Evolution of Sympathy and Morality.” Professor George has authored over 50 peer-reviewed articles and two books: Christianity and Extraterrestrials? A Catholic Perspective(2005) and Stewardship of Creation (2009). She is currently working on Aquinas’s “Fifth Way,” and also on a variety of questions concerning living things (self-motion, consciousness, evolution, etc.). Professor George is a member of ten philosophical societies, including the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, and the Society for Aristotelian Studies.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So if we're going to ask the question of whether animals are intelligent, we have to make up our minds what we mean by intelligent. |
| 0:07.2 | Now, some people think that plants are intelligent. After all, deciduous trees in the east, they drop their leaves in the fall, and they put out new leaves in the spring. |
| 0:19.0 | They don't put them out in the middle of the winter when they would just freeze, right? |
| 0:22.3 | That's intelligent. |
| 0:24.1 | However, I think they're good reasons to think |
| 0:26.8 | that plants don't know anything. |
| 0:29.0 | So if a thing doesn't know anything, |
| 0:30.8 | it can't be intelligent. |
| 0:33.0 | So it might act intelligently, |
| 0:35.4 | but you can't attribute intelligence to it itself. Like computers, they act intelligently, but you can't attribute intelligence to it itself. |
| 0:38.3 | Like computers, they act intelligently, but they're not intelligent. |
| 0:42.9 | So animals have knowledge. |
| 0:45.9 | But we wouldn't attribute intelligence to animals on the basis of their instinctual knowledge. |
| 0:53.1 | So for example, if you have a dog, when dogs are indoors, |
| 0:58.3 | sometimes they'll like spin around several times before they lie down. |
| 1:03.4 | And that serves absolutely no useful purpose. |
| 1:06.2 | If they were outdoors, that's an instinct which would actually allow them to kind of even |
| 1:11.6 | out the surface they're about to lie down on if they're like leaves or stones or something |
| 1:15.8 | like that. But indoors, it's absolutely pointless, but they do it anyway. So we see in the case |
| 1:21.9 | of instinctive behavior that instinct is blind. The animal really doesn't know why it's doing what |
| 1:27.1 | it's doing. Okay. |
| 1:29.2 | So intelligence then requires not just the ability to know, but also the ability to learn. |
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