I am reading Plato’s Laches dialogue as part of my distance learning course. The question posed for my assignment is ‘what is courage?’
One of the participants in the dialogue suggests that understanding is necessary for courage. Therefore animals like lions are not courageous, merely fearless and fearsome because they lack wisdom.
But is that true? Animals acquire knowledge, hunting skills and social skills that require them to make judgements about risks and benefits. This is behaviour they have to learn and surely gives them wisdom? Some might argue that animal instincts are not the same as cognitive thinking, and that wisdom or knowledge is only arrived at by considered thought processes that make judgements beyond what is instinctive.
I’m not so sure that all animal behaviour lacks reasoning, or that it is mere instinct that makes them behave in a certain way. Given the difficulty that we have in trying to find out the content of other human minds, it seems sensible not to exclude the possibility that our fellow travellers along the evolutionary path have complex thought processes, memories and emotions.
odespinner 