Two Lectures on Animals and Humans Author: [France] Gilbert Simondon Publisher: Guangxi People's Publishing House Translator: Song Dechao

- Editor's Recommendation -

★The first officially published Chinese translation of Gilbert Simondon, a philosopher highly respected by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Bernard Stiegler and Bruno Latour.

★In his famous philosophical work "The Individual and Its Physico-Biological Origin", Simondon asked himself: "How do psychology and life differ from each other?" In order to find the answer, he felt it necessary to first review the concept of animal and human life. In this book, Simondon raised questions about the unity of life, animal and human life, and the relationship between life and intelligence, habits, and instincts, showing us how thinkers from ancient times to the present have thought about this.

★What is the relationship between animals and humans? Socrates would say: There is an essential difference between human reason and animal instinct. Plato would say: Man is the prototype of all animals, and animals are low-level people. Descartes would say: Animals have neither intelligence nor instinct, they are machines, automatic things. Simondon would answer: There is no essential difference between animals and humans, everything is existence, and we must think about the meaning of existence in a specific way every time.

- Introduction -

This book is derived from the lecture notes of Gilbert Simondon's two courses, and mainly discusses the relationship between animals and humans. Although this is not a fundamental problem in philosophy, it has repeatedly appeared in the thought landscape of many philosophical giants throughout the ages. In the book, Simondon sorted out the concise history of this problem from the ancient Greek and Roman periods to the 17th century. He not only discussed the relevant thoughts of the most important figures in the history of philosophy, such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Descartes, but also talked about many authors who are not often touched by philosophers, such as St. Francis of Assisi, Montaigne, Bossuet and La Fontaine. Simondon did not insist on pushing the discussion of various doctrines to a difficult and obscure abstract level, but cut in from the historical dimension of ideas, and clearly presented to us the contributions made by different schools of thought to the proposal and solution of this problem. From this, we can see that the relationship between animals and humans not only involves the epistemological dimension, but also widely includes ethics, even religion, and ultimately metaphysical dimensions.

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