Mandeville on Pride and Animal Nature

TY - CHAP

T1 - Mandeville on Pride and Animal Nature

AU - Callanan, John Joseph

PY - 2015/10/5

Y1 - 2015/10/5

N2 - Mandeville’s first publication – the thesis Disputatio Philosophica de Brutorum Operationibus (1689) – advocated the Cartesian position that both denied feeling and sensation, let alone thought, to non-human animals and stressed the inherent distinctiveness of the conscious sensory and inferential capacities of human agents. Yet his later writings subscribed to a directly opposed Enlightenment position. His translation of La Fontaine’s Fables drew comparisons between humans and animal throughout, and by the time of the Fable of the Bees, Mandeville was clearly in the camp stressing the continuity of human and non-human animal nature, a tradition following Hobbes, Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld, and later to include Helvetius, de la Mettrie and Hume. The function of pride in Mandeville’s ethics is examined in terms of this debate, framed by Bayle’s famous ‘Rorarius’ entry in his Dictionary. The theological motivation for the denial of continuity is unsurprisingly maintained by dualists such as Descartes and Gassendi (otherwise opposed in so many ways) but also later by French materialists such as Condillac. With this background in place, Mandeville’s claim regarding the psychological of pride as the ‘other Recompense…[of] the vain Satisfaction of making our Species appear more exalted and remote from that of other Animals’ is then discussed. It is suggested as a critique of Shaftesbury’s discussion in the Characteristics relating to changes in animal nature in response to abundance of resources as well as to Shaftesbury’s various comments on the distinction between human and animal nature.

AB - Mandeville’s first publication – the thesis Disputatio Philosophica de Brutorum Operationibus (1689) – advocated the Cartesian position that both denied feeling and sensation, let alone thought, to non-human animals and stressed the inherent distinctiveness of the conscious sensory and inferential capacities of human agents. Yet his later writings subscribed to a directly opposed Enlightenment position. His translation of La Fontaine’s Fables drew comparisons between humans and animal throughout, and by the time of the Fable of the Bees, Mandeville was clearly in the camp stressing the continuity of human and non-human animal nature, a tradition following Hobbes, Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld, and later to include Helvetius, de la Mettrie and Hume. The function of pride in Mandeville’s ethics is examined in terms of this debate, framed by Bayle’s famous ‘Rorarius’ entry in his Dictionary. The theological motivation for the denial of continuity is unsurprisingly maintained by dualists such as Descartes and Gassendi (otherwise opposed in so many ways) but also later by French materialists such as Condillac. With this background in place, Mandeville’s claim regarding the psychological of pride as the ‘other Recompense…[of] the vain Satisfaction of making our Species appear more exalted and remote from that of other Animals’ is then discussed. It is suggested as a critique of Shaftesbury’s discussion in the Characteristics relating to changes in animal nature in response to abundance of resources as well as to Shaftesbury’s various comments on the distinction between human and animal nature.

UR - http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319193809

M3 - Chapter

SN - 9783319193809

SP - 125

EP - 136

BT - Bernard Mandeville's Tropology of Paradoxes

A2 - Pires, Edmundo Balsemão

A2 - Braga, Joaquim

PB - Springer

ER -