Article: Aristotle, the Scale of Nature, and modern attitudes to animals.(In the Company of Animals)

George Gaylord Simpson, one of the great biologists of this century, began his book on The Principles of Taxonomy (1961) with the statement that, "Any discussion should start with a clear understanding as to what is to be discussed." What will be discussed here is how the animal kingdom has been classified in the European-speaking world since the time of Aristotle, and how these classifications have affected our attitudes to animals today. I will start with the dominating role that Aristotle played in European civilization for an incredible length of time. Then I will go on to discuss how this dominance began to crack in the eighteenth century, and how it was finally broken ...

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