A creature apart?
On the axis: Humanity's place in nature · the human being
Is the human a being apart, held by reason and spirit above nature and bearing a singular dignity, or a living creature sprung from it, continuous with the animal and subject like it to its laws? The posture one adopts turns on this.
Justification
Once material nature is nothing but extension governed by the laws of motion, knowing the forces of bodies as one knows a mechanism allows them to be applied to every use, medicine first of all. Descartes replaces the speculative philosophy of the Schools, which contemplates essences, with a practical philosophy that transforms: the end of knowledge is no longer to understand a given order but to harness it. Nature ceases to be a community or a mother and becomes a domain to be possessed, a programme that inaugurates the modern technological relation to the world.
Instead of that speculative philosophy taught in the schools, we may find a practical one […] and thus render ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature.Discourse on Method, VI
Discourse on Method, VI
Anchors: Pico della Mirandola · Descartes · Spinoza · Darwin