ABSTRACT
In Robert Renehan’s examination of the profoundly anthropocentric bent of Greek thought that manifested itself in the numerous reiterations and variations of the “man alone of animals” formula that have formed the focus of our study, that formula, in the majority of its applications, is viewed as a reflection of an attitude toward human intellectual capacities that, in the opinion of the Greeks, were not shared by other animal species.1 It is man’s intellectual uniqueness that preoccupies Renehan, although he incorporates some slight discussion of man’s supposedly unique anatomical features. His decision to omit almost entirely the third type of claim of human uniqueness encountered in classical sources, namely that man alone of animals experiences true emotional states, is puzzling on two counts. Not only do we find relatively frequent assertions in Greek and Roman sources that man alone of animals experiences a number of what would equally so today be recognized as emotions, but, since emotions were regularly viewed in Greek philosophical thought as having a cognitive dimension, one might have expected Renehan to include discussion of Greek claims of man’s emotional uniqueness, if in fact emotional states are to be understood as operations of the reason reacting to external stimuli, as Greek philosophical schools explained their origin.
