Marin Cureau de la Chambre: Cognition and Language in Animals

In the context of a lively debate with Pierre Chanet, Marin Cureau de la Chambre, an atypical Aristotelian, offers an interesting contribution to the well-known mid-17th-century querelle on the cognitive and communicative capacities of animals. His non-anthropocentric reformulation of the traditional concepts of rationality and language leads him to talk of an imaginative ratio and proper forms of communication, intentional and articulate in their vocal expressions, in the context of the animal world. Furthermore, his reworking of the notion of instinct in the light of Platonism entails a reconsideration of it as totally dependant on genuine cognitive abilities, especially on memory and reason.