ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Johann Gottfried Herder’s engagement with Condillac’s conception of the human animal and, more specifically, Condillac’s claim that human cognition constitutes a more developed form of animal cognition. While agreeing with Condillac that central features of human cognition form through experience over time, such as having the capacities for reason and language, Herder argued that a special type of reflective awareness is needed to get this developmental process started. He thus cemented the species border as he made a natural endowment the criterion for assessing who can and cannot have reason. This chapter argues that instead of rejecting Condillac’s continuity thesis, Herder in fact developed it further. This becomes clear if seen in the wider context of his metaphysics of nature. He here explains that sustained developments in nature are able to transform the cognitive make-up of a species as a whole, which leads to a reconfiguration of the starting point from which each individual member embarks when starting species-specific developmental trajectories.
