Problem of ''language'' and mind of animals in philosophic doctrines of early Modernity

The reviewed paper is devoted to the analysis of approaches to solution of animals' ''language'' and mind problem worked out in main philosophic doctrines of the second half of the 16th - first half of the 18th centuries. Having explored the development of the European thinkers' views in a relative chronological order the author finds it externally similar to a spiral turn. Though materialists of the Enlightenment came to the ideas formally close to the late Renaissance skeptics' positions, ways of thoughts proper to representatives of those schools were principally different. That difference was caused by a powerful intellectual dynamics of the 17th century. Montaigne and his followers made a difference between human beings and animals relative proceeding from the notion of a universal animateness of the world. Also they found it incorrect to state some normative concerning manifestations of intelligence. Inclined to deny a human-like mind and language of animals the empirics showed at the same time characteristic incertitude. It is argued that roots of that incertitude laid in general principles of their epistemology. From their point of view, unlike other animals, people possess an ability to abstract and generalize sensitive data, though the source of our knowledge is not specifically human. Owing to the named ability people can create general notions which form the content of a language. With much more principality and consistency than the empirics the idea of cognitive and communicative uniqueness of a human being was maintained by the Cartesians. The rationalistic interpretation of human specifics became the result of a methodical reduction, the first stage of which was reducing all the existing to an intelligent subject. Accordingly, the second stage of that operation was reducing intelligence to a single form constitutive to it, i.e., to normal human speech. Due to the evident dogmatic character of the given statements, successive thinkers of the Enlightenment needed just to point at it and at common sense in order to refuse them. It allowed the materialists to completely include a human being in a mechanical world-picture figured by the Cartesians and eliminate the metaphysical difference between people and other animals.

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