ABSTRACT
Descartes’ ‘bête-machine’ doctrine is commonly, and, I will argue, wrongly, glossed in characteristic ways.1 First, the gloss that many Anglophone philosophers routinely put upon the content of this doctrine is that nonhuman animals are unconscious, a claim which they understand as meaning that animals neither think nor feel. To put it baldly, I will argue that in Descartes’ view, animals could feel but not think. Second, the bête-machine doctrine is commonly viewed as a scientific hypothesis, one that is in principle open to empirical refutation. I will argue that for Descartes it was clearly a metaphysical, not an empirical, doctrine. Third, although it is sometimes recognised that he claimed ‘moral certainty’ for this doctrine, that concept is not well understood in the literature, hence neither are Descartes’ argumentative strategies vis-à-vis the doctrine.
