And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the

LMU in Munich. Online at www. History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about philosophical conceptions of animals in the Renaissance with

Chishilia Muratore, who is a research fellow in the Department of Italian at the University of

War.

Hi Chichilia, thanks very much for coming on the podcast.

We normally think of animals as being sort of between plants

and humans, and of course, Aristotle thought

about them this way too.

And so I guess the first question that arises here is whether Renaissance

philosophers just follow those sort of line do they say well they're defining

characteristics of plants on the one hand and humans on the other and then there's going to be some defining characteristics of non-human animals in the middle.

Yeah, one of the perhaps most interesting characteristics of the Renaissance, especially if we look at the problem of the animal saw is that there is a

variety of positions and it's very hard to bring it down to one main position. So in a sense the Renaissance philosophy

is resist a sort of simplification into one main strand, one main theory. But still having said that as you mentioned Aristotle these texts

there are red and circulated had an impact and of course the question of whether animals are rational is one main strand of the discourse.

The first problem that we encounter though if we look a bit closer at this problem of animal rationalities, what is meant by rationality.

There is an issue of translating the texts, so as Aristotle's the anima, on the soul is translated from Greek into Latin. What actually are we talking

about when we talk about rationality and what is the part of the soul of the animals are supposed to have or not to have is a anima in a sense of

a mens which we could translate as mind and what does this man's do? So what is the activity, what is rational thinking

that we are attributing or not attributing to the animals? One interesting example to just approach this problem today is the treatment of animal

Russianite in Campanella and Tomazo Campanella is in one of his main works, which is the Censureum, was published for the first time in the 1620s.

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