"What is an animal? This is one of those questions that prove all the more puzzling the more one knows about philosophy”.

The entry on “animal” of the Encyclopédie wasn’t alone in voicing this predicament. Debates on the nature of animals loomed large throughout the early modern age, and grew to the point of calling into question as fundamental issues as the general metaphysics of the mind and the overall epistemology of perception. Their far-reaching implications challenged theology, culture and society at large: suffice it to consider the controversies over the mortality of the soul and the growing concerns over animal exploitation. Early modern thinkers conceived of animals in the most disparate fashions: as blind pieces of clockwork or, at the opposite, as fully rational beings, capable of outsmarting humans. Polemics escalated to the point that, by the eighteenth century, “one cat was enough to disarrange all of philosophy”.

The conference investigates the competing theories of the animal mind worked out from the Italian Renaissance to the German Enlightenment, and their broader implications for the philosophical and scientific debates of the time, all over Europe. The conference intends thereby to provide new insights into the shifting understanding of the human-animal divide and the early modern theory of the mind – indeed, of minds.

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