MISKAWAYH ON ANIMALS Peter Adamson Abstract Drawing on all the extant philosophical works of Miskawayh, including his well known Refinement of Character, this paper aims to determine his attitudes towards the psychological capacities and moral standing of non-human ani- mals. Miskawayh most often mentions animals as a contrast to the rationality of humans, but also grants animals likenesses or lesser versions of typically human traits like virtues and friendship. It is argued that for Miskawayh, the teleological design of animals gives humans reasons to show them justice. It is increasingly acknowledged that philosophical writings from the classical period of the Islamic world have interesting things to say about non-human animals.1 A number of thinkers, including Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d. 1037 CE), followed the lead of Aristotle by writ- ing on zoology and exploring the connections between biology and other areas of the philosophical curriculum.2 Perhaps more arresting 1. In what follows I will, for brevity’s sake, mostly use the word “animals” to refer to non-human animals. This should not obscure the fact that, as will become clear, the com- monality of animal functions between humans and non-human animals will be central to the discussion. For general research on the topic see e.g. P. Adamson, “The Ethical Treat- ment of Animals,” in: R. C. Taylor – L. X. López-Farjeat (eds.), Routledge Companion to Islamic Philosophy, London 2015, pp. 371-382; P. Adamson, “Human and Animal Nature in the Philosophy of the Islamic World,” in: P. Adamson – G. F. Edwards (eds.), Animals: A History, Oxford 2018, pp. 90-113; G. H. Bousquet, “Des animaux et de leur traitement selon le Judaïsme, le Christianisme, et l’Islam,” in: Studia Islamica 9 (1958), pp. 31-48; R. C. Foltz, Animals in Islamic Tradition and Muslim Cultures, Oxford 2006. The topic is also receiving increasing attention within research on Latin Christendom. See e.g. A. Oelze, Animal Rationality: Later Medieval Theories 1250-1350, Leiden 2018; C. Muratori, Renaissance Vegetarianism: The Philosophical Afterlives of Porphyry’s On Abstinence, C ­ ambridge 2020; A. Oelze, Animal Minds in Medieval Latin Philosophy, Cham 2021. 2. See e.g. R. Kruk, “Ibn Sīnā on Animals: Between the First Teacher and the Physi- cian,” in: J. L. Janssens – D. De Smet (eds.), Avicenna and His Heritage, Leuven 2002, pp. 325-341; B. Musallam, “Avicenna: Medicine and Biology,” in: Encyclopedia Iranica Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales 89(1), 1-24. doi: 10.2143/RTPM.89.1.3290726 © 2022 by Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales. All rights reserved. 2 P. ADAMSON for modern-day readers are passages exhorting readers to show benevolence towards animals. We find this sentiment being expressed, for instance, by Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (d. 925)3 and Ibn Ṭufayl (d. 1185).4 The anonymous authors who called themselves the “Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafā᾿)” went so far as to write a narrative in which animals go to court to prevent humans from continuing to abuse them.5 Another philosopher whose remarks on animals have, by contrast, gone unnoticed is Abū ῾Alī Miskawayh (d. 1030). This neglect is to some extent understandable, because Miskawayh did not write a dedicated treatise on animals, nor does he discuss cruelty to animals at such length as the other authors just mentioned. He does, however, recognize the possibility of committing “injustice” towards animals in The Refinement of Character (Tahdhīb al-akhlāq), perhaps the best-known work of philosophical ethics from the classi- cal Islamic world.6 And this is only one way in which the topic enters into his philosophy. Across his corpus he makes frequent reference to (2011); T. Alpina, “Is the Heaven an Animal? Avicenna’s Celestial Psychology at the Intersection between Cosmology and Biology,” in: R. Salles (ed.), Biology and Cosmology in Ancient Philosophy: From Thales to Avicenna, Cambridge 2021, pp. 261-278. 3. T.-A.  Druart, “Al-Razi’s Conception of the Soul: Psychological Background to His Ethics,” in: Medieval Philosophy and Theology 5 (1996), pp. 245-263; P. Adamson, “Abū Bakr al-Rāzī on Animals,” in: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 94 (2012), pp. 249-273. 4. B.  Somma, Models of Desire in Graeco-Arabic Philosophy: From Plotinus to Ibn Ṭufayl, Leiden 2021. 5. Edited and translated in L. E. Goodman and R. McGregor (eds. and trans.), Epistles of the Brethren of Purity: The Case of the Animals Versus Man Before the King of the Jinn, Oxford 2010; for recent studies see S. Tlili, “All Animals Are Equal, or Are They? The Ikhwān al-Ṣafā᾿’s Animal Epistle and its Unhappy End,” in: Journal of Quranic Stud- ies 16 (2014), pp. 42-88; G. De Callataÿ, “‘For Those with Eyes to See’: On the Hidden Meaning of the Animal Fable in the Rasā᾿il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā᾿,” in: Journal of Islamic Stud- ies 29 (2018), pp. 357-391; K. Loevy, “The Ikhwān al-Ṣafā᾿’s Animal Accusers: An Islamic Debate on Animal Slavery,” in: Environmental Philosophy 16 (2019), pp. 319-338; J. Mattila, “The Animal Fable of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā᾿ in Context: The Ontological and Moral Status of Animals in Early Islamic Thought,” in: R. Mattila – S. Ito – S. Fink (eds.), Animals and Their Relation to Gods, Humans and Things in the Ancient World, Wiesbaden 2019, pp. 345-366. 6. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-Akhlaq, ed. C. Zurayk, Beirut 1966; English version in C. Zurayk (trans.), Miskawayh: The Refinement of Character, Beirut 1968. Cited below by Arabic page number, abbreviated as Ref. For a recent collection of studies see S. Günther – Y. El Jamouhi (eds.), Islamic Ethics as Educational Discourse: Thought and Impact of the Classical Muslim Thinker Miskawayh (d. 1030), Tübingen 2021.  MISKAWAYH ON ANIMALS 3 the animals, most often when drawing lessons from their p­ sychological capacities and their behavior to make points about human ethics. His other writings include short treatises on justice (Risāla fī l-῾Adl)7 and on pleasure and pain (Fī l-ladhdhāt wa-l-ālām),8 as well as a somewhat longer, didactic work of Neoplatonic cosmology called The Smaller Book of Victory (al-Fawz al-aṣghar).9 Two further works respond to other authors. In one, Miskawayh sets out his theories of soul and intellect in response to an anonymous, materialist author.10 In the other, he provides answers to questions posed by his colleague al-Tawḥīdī (d. 1023). This latter work even alludes to animals in its title: Stray Camels and Enclosures (al-Hawāmil wa-shawāmil).11 Drawing on these works and of course the Refinement, I will in what follows discuss Miskawayh’s application of normative concepts to animals. In sections 1 and 2, I will explain how Miskawayh can speak of animals as being inferior to humans at the level of species, while also thinking that some animals are superior to many individual humans. In section 3, I will show that Miskawayh recognizes a scale of perfection among animals. He recognizes that they can in a sense 7. Cited by folio number from M. S. Khan, An Unpublished Treatise of Miskawayh on Justice, Leiden 1964, abbreviated as Just. 8. Study and translation in P. Adamson, “Miskawayh on Pleasure,” in: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 25 (2015), pp. 199-223; editions in M. Arkoun, “Deux épîtres de Mis- kawayh,” in: Bulletin d’Études Orientales 17 (1961/2), pp. 7-74; ῾A. Badawī (ed.), Dirāsāt wa-nuṣūṣ fī al-falsafa wa-al-῾ulūm ῾inda al-῾Arab, Beirut 1981. Cited by section number from my translation in the 2015 article, abbreviated as Pleas. 9. Cited by section number from Miskawayh, Le Petit Livre du Salut – al-Fawz al-Aṣghar, ed. Ṣ. ῾Uḍayma, trans. R. Arnaldez, Tunis 1987, abbreviated as Vict. I offer my own translations from this work; otherwise I have quoted from available English translations of Miskawayh’s works, with modifications. 10. Translated and studied in P. Adamson and P. E. Pormann, “More than Heat and Light: Miskawayh’s Epistle on Soul and Intellect,” in: Muslim World 102 (2012), pp. 478- 524. Edited in Arkoun, “Deux épîtres de Miskawayh,” and Badawī, Dirāsāt wa-nuṣūṣ; cited by the page numbers from Badawī’s edition and abbreviated SI. 11. Cited by section number from S. Vasalou and J. Montgomery (eds. and trans.), Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī and Abū ῾Alī Miskawayh: The Philosopher Responds. An Intellectual Encounter from the Tenth Century, 2 vols, New York 2019, abbreviated as SE. The point of the title is that Miskawayh is reacting with order and clarity (or less charitably, ped- antry) to the occasionally rambling and scattered questions of al-Tawḥīdī. Miskawayh also compares his willful correspondent to a stallion, roaming about with prideful gait (SE 4.4). At the risk of reading too much into this comparison, Miskawayh may thereby implicitly charge al-Tawḥīdī with letting his “spirited” soul become too dominant; for this concept see section 1 below. 4 P. ADAMSON partake of such things as pleasure, friendship, and happiness—albeit that they have lesser versions of these phenomena, mere “imitations” of what we find in humans. The capacity of animals to “perfect them- selves” suffices, as we will see in section 4, to support the claim that we must show them justice. Finally, at the end of the paper I will briefly compare Miskawayh’s ideas about animals to those of a some- what earlier philosopher, Abū Bakr al-Rāzī. 1. The superiority of (some) humans to animals It’s easy to find slighting remarks about animals in the works of Mis- kawayh. In one striking example, after waxing poetic about the great blessings shown to us by God’s providence, he says, “by my life, none are ignorant of these benefits, apart from cattle!” (Ref. 121). A couple of caveats are in order here, though. First, the remark may not be meant very seriously, since it is a pun: “benefits” is ni῾am, “cattle” is na῾am, and the two words are written the same in Arabic. Second, Miskwayh may be echoing Aristotle’s famous remark that hedonism is a life suitable only for cattle (Nicomachean Ethics, I, 5, 1095b20). Still, there is ample theoretical justification in Miskawayh’s ethics for comparing ignorant people and hedonists to beasts. This justification stems from his account of the human soul, which he explicitly makes the foundation for his ethical teachings (Ref. 3, 39). Like a number of other early philosophers who wrote in Arabic, including al-Kindī and al-Rāzī, Miskawayh adopts Plato’s tripartite account of the soul. He speaks variously of three “souls” (e.g. SE 163), three “parts” of the single human soul (e.g. Vict 2.5), and “powers” or “faculties” (quwan) of soul (e.g. Ref. 15). The three parts are those familiar from the Platonic dialogues: reason, the spirited part or “irascible” faculty, and the desiring faculty. This is directly relevant to our theme, because the latter two powers are also found in animals. Only reason (῾aql, nuṭq) is unique to humans, so it “distinguishes” us from animals (Ref. 132).12 12. For further discussion see P. Adamson, “Miskawayh’s Psychology,” in: Adamson (ed.), Classical Arabic Philosophy: Sources and Reception, London 2007, P. ­ pp. 39-54. Compare the contrast between animals and humans in terms of rationality at Yaḥyā Ibn ῾Adī, The Reformation of Morals, ed. and trans. S. H. Griffith, Provo 2002, pp. 8-10 and 14-16.  MISKAWAYH ON ANIMALS 5 Nor is this simply a matter of classification. Miskawayh says that reason makes us better than animals, because it gives us a capacity for self-control and discernment that is lacking in them: SE 2.4: Human beings are constantly in a fight (jihād) against their souls, using the power of their reason (bi-quwwa ῾aqlihi). For they need reason to restrain their soul, to bring it under control, and to stand in the way of their base desires (shahawāt), so that they only partake of these desires to the degree that reason allows and determines, prescribes and permits. People who do not constantly wage this struggle throughout their lives have no claim to the status of humanity (ḥaẓẓ al-insāniyya): they are as wanton as beasts that roam unsupervised without the oversight (raqīb) of reason. SI 64: Is there a difference between the human and the beast apart from our ability to think and discern? Indeed, it is this ability which sets us above others: through it we hasten after all good things, while shunning everything evil. Through it we distinguish between good and evil in things, and discern the noble from the base in actions, the true from the false in statements, and the real from the unreal in opinions. Characteristically, Miskawayh draws on both Platonic and Aristote- lian philosophy in his conception of reason.13 From Platonism he takes the supervisory function of reason, which is to subdue the lower soul parts, as even one name for “reason” suggests: ῾aql relates to the verb for “restraining” (SE 13.3). Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics would have been a source for this idea (1102b-1103a). The Aristotelian ­tradition also gives Miskawayh the cognitive function of reason, namely to reach correct beliefs in both practical and theoretical phi- losophy (for this distinction see e.g. Vict. 2.9). Thus, in the final sentence of the second quotation just given, he echoes the definition of logic found in Alexandrian commentaries on Aristotle as an instru- ment for showing “in the theoretical domain, what is true and what false, and in the practical domain, what is good and what is bad.”14 13. Of course Miskawayh was not the first to attempt a reconciliation between the two authorities on this topic. Among other sources, the Pseudo-Aristotelian On Virtues and Vices was known in Arabic and could have been influential on him here: for example, it alludes to the Platonic tripartite soul and classifies the virtues on this basis. At Ref. 86-91 Miskawayh quotes extensively from a supposedly Aristotelian treatise called On the Virtues of the Soul, translated by Abū ῾Uthmān al-Dimashqī, but this is not the same work. 14. As already pointed out in Adamson and P. E. Pormann, “More than Heat and Light,” p. 493, n. 51. Compare e.g. Elias’ definition of logic at L. G. Westerink, “Elias on the Prior Analytics,” in: Mnemosyne 14 (1961), pp. 126-139, 134.23-4. 6 P. ADAMSON Again, both functions are distinctive of humans. As we see in the first quotation and will discuss further below, Miskawayh even doubts whether someone who fails to apply reason is fully “human.” Humans are quite literally further developed than animals, because the rational power arises in the embryo after the lower powers do.15 First it acquires the “vegetative soul,” then the “animal soul,” and then: SE 163.3: it remains at the level of beasts until it develops the preparedness to receive the trace of rationality (athar al-nuṭq), that is, discernment and reflection (al-tamyīz wa-l-rawiyya). At that point, the trace of the intellect (athar al-῾aql) manifests itself in it. Notice that Miskawayh even calls the second, irascible power the “ani- mal soul (al-nafs al-ḥayawāniyya),” whereas the desiring soul is called “vegetative (nāmiyya).” The point of this is that plants have only the capacity for nutrition and reproduction, the functions that are associ- ated with the desiring soul. Animals, by contrast, also have emotional reactions – including anger, hence the term “irascible power” – and the capacity for sensation and (in most animals) motion. Humans, of course, have both sets of powers and also the power of reason. Thus a human soul is simply an animal soul to which reason has been added. Alongside the distinctive capacities that distinguish humans from animals, there is an ontological difference. The animal soul (whether in humans or animals) is a physical entity, whereas the rational soul is not.16 Though Miskawayh does at one point speak of the entire human soul as “material,” because it is so powerfully influenced by the body (SE 66.2), he explicitly denies that this soul is really a mate- rial form (ṣūra hayūlāniyya). This phrase may appropriately be applied to organic “life,” which is found also in plants and animals, but not to the rational soul, which will survive the death of the body 15. This may be based on either Aristotle (On the Generation of Animals, II, 3) or Galen: see his treatise The Construction of the Embryo in P. Singer (trans.), Galen: Selected Works, Oxford 1997, and for the late ancient Neoplatonic reception of this theory J. Wilberding, Forms, Souls and Embryos: Neoplatonists on Human Reproduction. Issues in Ancient Philosophy, London 2016. 16. This raises serious questions about the unity of the soul, which I will not address here in part because I have done so elsewhere (Adamson, “Miskawayh’s Psychology”). But to make a long story short, Miskawayh holds that the lower souls are only “parts” in a metaphorical sense, and are in fact powers projected by the rational soul into the body and differentiated in their actions by the organs that receive the soul’s influence. An ­important text on this is Vict. 2.5.  MISKAWAYH ON ANIMALS 7 (Vict. 2.5). He follows Plato and Galen by admitting that reason is associated with the brain and its powers received in the “spirit” (rūḥ, corresponding to Greek pneuma) in the brain (Vict. 3.3). But he emphasizes that the brain is only the “instrument” of the rational soul, from which the latter remains independent, like the craftsperson who is distinct from the tool (Vict. 2.5, SE 62.2-3, SI 73). Similarly Miskawayh distinguishes sharply between the type of cognition proper to the rational soul and that proper to the animal soul. These are intellection and sensation, respectively, and have different kinds of forms as their objects. Sensation uses bodily organs to grasp forms in bodies, whereas intellection needs no organs and grasps immaterial forms (SE 36.2, SI 60, Vict. 2.3-4).17 Note that knowledge or intel- lectual understanding is the only cognitive function of reason. Other functions, like imagination, are aligned with sensation (SI 65), which would explain why they are also available to animals. The cognitive contrast with animals is made amply clear by Miska- wayh. At one point he even groups animals together with minerals, plants, and meteorological events, since all of these are unable to grasp the forms of things emanated from God, as humans can do (Pleas. 16). Still, it is the supervisory power of reason that more often leads him to mention animals by way of contrast to humans. He regularly tries to shame his reader into adopting a more self-controlled lifestyle by saying that failing to do so would be living like a beast. To pursue the goals of the lower soul is to go after “false” pleasures which are “pleas- ures which we share in common with the irrational animals (al-ḥayawānāt allatī laysat nāṭiqa), since those pleasures have to do with sensation (ḥissiyya)” (Ref. 94). Describing a person who should be maintaining a healthy diet but lacks the willpower to do so, Mis- kawayh moralizes: “deficient restraint and the powerful ­attraction of nature lead one to diverge from discernment (tamyīz) and to share in common with the beasts (mushārakat al-bahā᾿im)” (SE 4.9). Later in 17. See also the fragment of Miskawayh edited at Arkoun, “Deux épîtres de Miska- wayh,” p. 197: “It is known that all animals have in common a power of sensation, motion, pursuit, and avoidance. These activities are not on account of their being bodily, but rather due to there being in them one of the animal, irascible souls. Likewise, every one of us agrees that all we humans have a power of thought, discernment, and the knowledge of what is hidden or obvious. Again, these activities are not on account of our bodies, but are rather on account of something called the rational soul, or the intellect.” 8 P. ADAMSON the same work he says that “people are merely beasts in human guise when they abandon themselves to [bodily] nature, yield to their blind desires, and fail to use the power given them to remedy this and edu- cate their souls” (SE 78.2). The close association between the lower souls and animal behavior is underscored by analogies comparing the non-rational souls to non- rational animals. This is of course something already found in Plato, who compares spirited soul to a lion and desiring soul to a many- headed beast (Republic 589A-B; one may also think of the chariot drawn by two horses in the Phaedrus, 246A). Galen followed suit, likening the tripartite soul to a human, dog, and beast.18 Miskawayh likewise compares the lower souls to animals, saying that inciting desire is like provoking dangerous wild animals (Ref. 185). This idea is even reflected in his enormous historical work, Experiences of the Nations, when he says that the Buyid amir Rukn al-Dawla sought only war booty: towards this end, he encouraged brutality in his sol- diers and habituated them to behave like savage beasts.19 From what we have seen so far, it may seem that Miskawayh has a thoroughly negative view toward animals. They serve primarily as a warning to us: look at how the beasts behave, and see that you don’t act as they do! (For a good example see Ref. 46, where Miskawayh invites readers to consider whether they would like to behave like beasts, rather than angels.) This attitude is evoked by Miskawayh himself when he is answering al-Tawḥīdī’s question why people admire ascetics and condemn hedonists. He says that humans partake of the vegetative, animal, and angelic natures through the three parts of their souls. And “humans regard plants and beasts with disdain and use them as they see fit, whereas they exalt and glorify the angels” (SE 38.2). Other passages suggest that as far as Miskawayh is con- cerned, people are right to think this way. The soul’s virtue lies in avoiding “actions proper to the body” (Ref. 9); we should work to 18. For discussion see M. Schiefsky, “Galen and the Tripartite Soul,” in: R. Barney – T. Brennan – C. Brittain (eds.), Plato and the Divided Self, Cambridge 2012, pp. 331-349. 19. H. F. Amedroz (ed.) and D. S. Margoliouth (trans.), The Eclipse of the Abbasid Caliphate, Oxford 1921, vol. 2, p. 279 (Arabic), vol. 5, p. 299 (English). It may be another reminiscence of the Platonic analogy when Miskawayh later says that an advisor who is overconfident in his control over the ruler is like a man riding a lion, at vol. 3, p. 141 (Arabic), vol. 6, p. 145 (English).  MISKAWAYH ON ANIMALS 9 combat the “passions (infi῾āl)” (SE 23.4); and, as we have already seen, we must fight against the lower souls (SE 2.4, cited above). But as Miskawayh’s answer to al-Tawḥīdī admits, we have a nature in common with animals. He does not, in the end, think that we should be aiming to eliminate this nature, but only to control it. He says as much in a later response to al-Tawḥīdī: SE 55.3: It is in the nature of the beastly soul (al-nafs al-bahīmiyya) to submit to the rational soul and to be restrained by the latter’s commands […] Yet nobody desires to eradicate this power completely. Rather, we demand that it receives order in its activities on the basis of what reason prescribes. In keeping with this Miskawayh cautions his fellow philosopher al-Tawḥīdī against excessive asceticism (SE 5.4, 103.4). We are not angels, after all, but embodied humans. So the lower powers we share with animals are part of us and are to be brought into moderation, not entirely suppressed: in ancient terms, the goal is the metriopatheia associated with the Peripatetic school, not the apatheia pursued by Stoics and Platonists. Sadly, most humans fail to achieve even this. As we have seen, Miskawayh deems those who are under the sway of the lower soul to be at the level of animals, and denies that they merit the title of “humanity” (SE 2.4, cited above). 2. The superiority of animals to (some) humans For more insight into this accusation, we may turn to a key passage of his chief ethical work, where he lays out a distinction between two kinds of happiness. Again, he says that humans partake of incorporeal and bodily natures, and have a level of virtue and of happiness cor- responding to each of these natures: Ref. 83: Humans possess a spiritual virtue by which we are akin to the good spirits that are called angels, and a bodily virtue, by which we are akin to the brutes (an῾ām). We are composed from both of them. On account of the bod- ily part by which we are akin to the brutes, we abide in this lower bodily world for a brief time to build it up, give it structure (yunaẓẓimu), and set it in order (yurattibu). But when we attain perfection at this level, we pass on the higher world. “So long as the human is human,” he goes on to say, both levels of virtue and happiness are needed. The lower form of virtue would seem to be reason’s supervision of the lower souls, while the higher 10 P. ADAMSON form is a cognitive grasp of higher intelligible forms—these being the two functions of reason we distinguished above. How many people manage to achieve these two levels of happiness? In his responses to al-Tawḥīdī, Miskawayh says that individual people become “more human” by fully realizing the distinctive capacities of humans, namely those associated with rationality (SE 92.3; see also 4.2). Further on, he draws out the implications: SE 102.3: The common run of human beings and the masses among the people (῾āmmat al-khalq wa-jumhūr al-nās) occupy a station close to that of the beasts; their rationality and discrimination do not go beyond imparting a certain order (tartīb) with a rational structure (niẓām ῾aqlī) to this beastly nature. He adds that the only people who manage to go beyond this modest degree of attainment are philosophers, and also prophets: clearly an elitist conclusion. But in light of the verbal parallels between this passage and the one just cited from Ref. 83 (both passages use the roots n-ẓ-m and r-t-b for imposing order on animal nature), it seems equally clear that Miskawayh’s elitism is qualified. He allows that the common run of people, those the Greeks called hoi polloi, are per- fectly able to achieve the lower form of happiness described in the Refinement of Character (this is linked to “bodily virtue,” which turns out to mean not virtue belonging not to the body, but to the soul insofar as it is related to the body). In doing so they have gone beyond the level of beasts, by imposing rational control over their lower souls. But they are not even close to realizing the intellectual perfection enjoyed by philosophers and prophets. This is why he says here that the virtuous masses are at a station “close to that of the beasts (fī manzila qarība min al-bahīmiyya).” As for people who do not manage even this, they are condemned as being not even animal-like, but instead as being worse than ani- mals. In one passage Miskawayh goes so far as to say that without the virtue imposed by the rule of reason, the human would be “the basest and lowest of all the animals, in fact, the meanest of all generated things” (Just. 6r-v).20 This may look like exaggeration for rhetorical 20. This echoes Aristotle, Politics, I, 2, 1253a31-3, which says that without justice humans are “the worst of all animals.”  MISKAWAYH ON ANIMALS 11 effect, but it is meant seriously, as we can see by returning to the passage on the two kinds of happiness: Ref. 84: Those who are not at either of these stations are in the rank (rutba) of the brutes; or rather, they err even more greatly, since [animals] err only because they are not exposed to these goods, and have not been given the capacity to move towards these higher levels (marātib). Through their faculties, they can move only towards the perfections proper to them (kamālātihā al-khāṣṣa bi-hā). Humans by contrast are exposed and called to these higher levels, and well equipped for them; yet they do not obtain them nor strive towards them, but rather prefer their opposites and use their noble faculties in the pursuit of base things. Those [sc. animals] do achieve their proper perfections. Thus, even if the brutes are denied the human goods and deprived of the opportunity of being in the vicinity of the good spirits and of admission into the Paradise promised to those who fear God, they may be excused. But the human is without excuse. Miskawayh then says that an animal is like a blind person who falls into a well, whereas the wicked human is like someone who falls in despite being able to see: we pity the former and blame the latter. The superiority of animals to vicious people, then, has to do with living up to potential. Animals manage to be as perfect as they can be, whereas those whose reason is dominated by the lower soul fall short of perfection. Indeed, they fall short twice over, since these people have not even attained the lower level of virtue or happiness. This is why they can be said to have lost the status of humanity: they are not using reason at all. Later in the same work, Miskawayh spells out in some- what different terms why one might see animals as better than bad humans. Again, he gives the example of someone who violates a pre- scribed diet that would make them healthy, or someone who overeats. To such a person he says: “this is the action of someone without reason (῾aql). Many beasts are likely better off than you are, because they do not seek pleasures only to lay hold of what is painful” (Ref. 187). This remark adds nuance to our picture of animals and their relation to desire. While they are not rational in the sense that they can exert control over their desires for things like sex and food, they seek these things naturally and so, in another sense, “moderately.” By contrast vicious humans seek them excessively, and wind up suffering pain that outweighs the pleasure they enjoyed from them.21 21. Of course, Miskawayh is not a hedonist, so presumably he does not mean that such vices are bad simply because they lead to more pain than pleasure. Rather, the poor planning of the vicious person who is ineffectively pursuing pleasure is just symptomatic 12 P. ADAMSON As this begins to suggest, Miskawayh’s evaluation of animals is not nearly as bleak as it may have seemed from the material we examined in section 1. True, they are confined to the range of perfections that can be realized by physical beings. But in this respect, they outdo humans.22 Animals are more capable of achieving pleasure (Ref. 10, SE 4.7) and can do so without inadvertently inflicting subsequent pain on themselves, because they don’t do things like overeat. Indeed it seems that, while animals do lack human’s supervisory capacity for self-control, they rarely if ever need self-control, since by instinct they pursue pleasures appropriately. A passage relevant to this point comes in the context of explaining why philosophers call the human “polit- ical (madanī) by nature.” Miskawayh explains that many other ani- mals are, unlike humans, capable of living on their own: Vict. 2.8: Each one of them is created to be self-sufficient without needing any others to survive. Instead, they are well equipped with everything that is distinctive of their life, inborn disposition, and instinct (ilhām) […] As for instinct, this is because they attain whatever nourishment is appropriate to them and avoid whatever is harmful to them, and they migrate from their summer to their winter habitat, and work out all that is beneficial by way of food and shelter, without needing any education or guidance (bi-ghayr ta῾līm wa-lā tadbīr), but just by inborn instinct. Now, this is hardly an original idea. Aristotle already said that those who do not need political communities are either beasts or gods (Poli- tics, I, 2, 1253a28). But the elaborateness of the passage (I have quoted only a small selection from it) conveys Miskawayh’s confidence that animals are created with everything they need to pursue, and acquire, their natural perfection. When they do so, they are more worthy of admiration than vicious humans, who fall short of even the perfection they should be achieving as embodied, “animal-like” beings. of their irrationality. Readers of Miskawayh who are motivated solely or primarily by pleasure and pain may also be swayed by such considerations to adopt more virtuous ways. 22. Miskwayh occasionally hints that humans may be physically superior to animals. Aside from his invocations of pneuma in the brain as an instrument for reason, which would presumably involve an anatomical difference from animals, he tells al-Tawḥīdī that the upright posture of humans can be accounted for on the grounds of a better mixture of heat and cold in the body (SE 127.2; cf. Aristotle, Parts of Animals, IV, 10). In any case, it is of course by virtue of their souls and not their better bodies that (virtuous) humans are really better than animals.  MISKAWAYH ON ANIMALS 13 3. Animal perfection We now have a good sense of the value Miskawayh places on animals: they rank higher than vicious humans, a bit lower than merely self- controlled humans, and much lower than philosophers and prophets. But this is to describe the goodness of animals in purely relative terms, by comparison to different groups of humans. What else can we say about the degree of perfection available to them? First of all, that this perfection varies depending on animal species. Miskwayh is fully committed to teleology in nature, and says that all animals and plants, as well as the elements and heavenly bodies, have “powers, dispositions, and activities through which they become this existent that they are, and through which they are distinguished from every- thing else” (Ref. 11). This of course is the general rule whose specific application we saw when Miskawayh said that humans are distin- guished by rationality. Just like the human species, every other animal species has a perfection proper to it. For instance horses should be agile and obedient to humans (Ref. 13). From this example one might have the impression that Miskawayh ranks animals by the standard of their usefulness to humans. But this is not quite right. Though his evaluation of animal species is certainly anthropocentric, it revolves not around benefit for humans but around similarity to humans. Because humans are the best animal species,23 other species get points for being more like humans. Thus he says that the “nobler beasts” are those that are “receptive to training (ta᾿dīb),” not because trained animals are so helpful to us but because training is “the effect of reason (athar al-nuṭq), that is, the rational soul” (Ref. 46). Here he seems to be thinking that, while animals have no rationality of their own, some of them—he mentions horses and falcons—are susceptible to influence from external reason, which is supplied by the human trainer. This makes good philosophical sense, since within the human the lower souls can be restrained by reason, and animal souls are very similar to our lower souls. An animal might 23. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for this journal for pointing me to a passage in the Arabic version of the Aristotelian zoology, which at History of Animals, I, 6, 491a22 should say that humans are the “best known (gnôrimôtaton)” of animals but instead says that they are the best (or actually “most noble and greatest”: akram wa a῾ẓam) of animals. See The Arabic Version of Aristotle’s Historia Animalium, ed. L. S. Filius, Leiden 2019, p. 122. 14 P. ADAMSON for instance be trained to restrain itself from pursuing food or an opportunity for mating, thus imitating what virtuous humans do when they impose rational control on their own desires. A more detailed version of this picture is offered in a later passage in the Refinement (Ref. 68). Here Miskawayh reiterates that the better animals are those that are more like humans. But he considers forms of similarity that do not involve external training. In fact he acknowl- edges four levels of perfection, with each level having internal grada- tions: (a) Animals without any special similarity to humans.24 (b) Animals that by nature care for their offspring, such as nesting birds. (c) Animals receptive of training; the best of these are again horses and falcons. (d) “Animals that imitate humans of their own accord and are similar to them without any instruction, like apes and the like.” They spontaneously imitate human actions without needing to be trained. It is furthermore emphasized that animals of class (d) are nearly as good as humans, which has the effect of showing that no possible degree of perfection has been omitted from nature. It turns out, then, that animal species are arranged along a scale of perfection just like human individuals are, with both scales being measured by the same criterion, that is, proximity to rationality. This opens the door to a further recognition on Miskawayh’s part, namely that animals can enjoy lesser versions of the goods distinctive of human life. Of course they do not imitate us by engaging in intellection, or even by dem- onstrating self-control. But pretty well every other aspect of human life that Miskawayh talks about in the Refinement can in some sense be ascribed to animals too: pleasure, of course, but also friendship, and even virtue and happiness. 24. This category is only present by implication: after describing class (b), Miskawayh says “such animals are superior (afḍal) to those that are not able to do any of these things.” Of course even animals of class (a) do have generic similarities to humans, e.g. by having sensation, and this is also explained in teleological terms. Thus at SE 100.2 he explains sensation in terms of the need to avoid physical harm; notice that this explanation will apply to all animals, even those that have only the sense of touch.  MISKAWAYH ON ANIMALS 15 3.1. Animal pleasure We have seen Miskawayh say quite a bit about the sort of pleasure available to animals, namely the pleasure also desired by the appetitive soul of humans. Indeed, as already mentioned, animals are better at acquiring these pleasures than we are. From this Miskawayh infers that bodily pleasure is not the distinctive end we humans should be pursu- ing (SE 88.9). But what about non-bodily pleasures? Miskawayh acknowledges the existence of such pleasures; they are attained through knowledge and the activity of the intellect (Ref. 94, 101). In the Refine- ment, he calls them “true” pleasures, as opposed to the “false” pleasures of food, drink, and sex, which consist in the replenishment of the body from deficient and painful states. This would suggest that animals, being limited to bodily activities, can only have false pleasures. In his treatise on pleasures and pains, though, Miskawayh offers a different approach to the topic of pleasure, inspired by Aristotle.25 He distances himself from the replenishment theory, and identifies “true” pleasures as those that are “natural” and supervene on perfec- tions (Pleas. 3).26 Thus animals can have true pleasures after all, and Miskawayh says as much: Pleas. 12: True pleasures reside precisely in complete perfections and com- mon ends. It was with these in view that humankind was created; indeed the other animals too, and in fact, all existing things. Nonetheless, Miskawayh still draws a sharp contrast between the highest pleasures that can be enjoyed by humans, and those available to animals: Pleas. 9: Because humans alone among the animals can apprehend their Creator with the intellect, which is the most noble of their apprehensions; and they can show abundant affection and love for Him, praise be to Him— it is necessary that they are distinguished from the other [animals] by virtue of the most noble of pleasures. The upshot is that animals cannot enjoy the highest pleasures avail- able to humans, but they can certainly enjoy some pleasures, which they attain by reaching the perfections relevant to their faculties. 25. For more on this see Adamson, “Miskawayh on Pleasure.” 26. In addition to the source texts in the Nicomachean Ethics, see the opening lines of Aristotle, Rhetoric, I, 11, for the idea of pleasure as restoration to the natural state. 16 P. ADAMSON Note however that for animals, just as for humans, pleasure is not the end being pursued. Rather, pleasure consists simply in the appre- hension of a state of perfection (Pleas. 1). As in Aristotle, the pleasure supervenes on the perfection, but is not itself the perfection. So, whereas the Refinement may have given us the impression that base pleasures are the final end toward which animal lives are directed, his treatise on pleasure implies that this is not the case. Rather, the goal of animal life will be quite simply to flourish—that is, to be a good example of the relevant species—with pleasure coming along as a side benefit of this flourishing. To flourish is of course perfectly to realize the capacities distinctive of the species. This remains tacit in the trea- tise on pleasures, but Miskawayh says it with crystal clarity in his responses to al-Tawḥīdī: “every existent in the world, be it natural or artificial, has a proper end […] it was brought into existence in order to accomplish that purpose” (SE 88.4). He goes on to give examples illustrating the realization of functions, including tools like hammers and scissors, organs like teeth, and finally animals, both non-rational and rational (SE 88.5). 3.2. Animal “friendship” If we look back at Miskawayh’s classification of the types of animals, we will see that species of type (b) are considered superior to those of type (a) because they show care to their conspecifics, especially off- spring. These will be the animals that are not fully self-sufficient in the way Miskawayh described in the passage on humans being “polit- ical animals,” which seemed to have in mind solitary animals of type (a), who get on just fine “without needing any others to survive.” To put it another way, animals of type (b) are to some extent like humans by having relations of community (cf. Aristotle, Politics, I, 2, 1253a, which alludes to animals that live in communities, such as bees). Does this mean that they can have “friendships” with one another, in the broad sense discussed by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics VIII and IX, which embraces family relationships? Not quite. In a section of the Refinement that is based closely on Aristotle’s treatment of friendship, Miskawayh says that it would be better to use the word “familiarity (ulfa)” to describe imtimacy between animals. Such familiarity “occurs properly between [animals] which are similar (bayna al-ashkāl min-hā  MISKAWAYH ON ANIMALS 17 khāṣṣatan)” (Ref. 136). It seems that they are incapable of “friendship” in the strict sense, because the various types of friendship are forms of “affection (maḥabba)” that arise “through volition and deliberation (bi-irāda wa-rawiyya).” Again, rationality makes the difference. Still, both human friendship and animal “familiarity” are exam- ples of a broader phenomenon, namely attraction between similar things, which we can observe among inanimate objects too.27 As Miskawayh says, even stones seek to arrive at the same natural place. The same idea is developed with similar vocabulary in Stray Camels and Enclosures, when Miskawayh tells al-Tawḥīdī that human friendships can be best understood as one variety of the “relation (nisba) between substances” that arises from either bodily or psy- chological affinity: SE 49.3: The relation that stems from the proper elemental mixture might be found between two humans or two beasts. For a similarity in mixtures causes familiarity (yu᾿allifu, same root as ulfa) and attraction between one similar being and another, without any intention, deliberation (rawiyya), or choice, this being found among many species of beasts, birds, and insects. In a pattern that is itself becoming familiar, Miskawayh thinks that animals manifest the same behaviors as humans, but also partake of a lower version of those same behaviors. They can enter into intimate relationships of affection or familiarity, but cannot enjoy friendship proper. The latter is based on an affinity between souls, not bodies, and as Aristotle said, it is divided into relationships based on utility, pleasure, and virtue (Ref. 143-4; SE 49.5).28 27. This extremely general conception of “love” or “affection,” which is found in all existents of the cosmos including animals, is also defended by Ibn Sīnā in his Treatise on Love, edited in M.A.F. Mehren (ed.), Traités mystiques d’Abou Ali al-Hosain b. Abdallah b. Sina ou d’Avicenna, Leiden 1894. 28. At SE 49.6 Miskawayh applies the tripartition of soul to the theory of friendship to argue that the “vegetative and beastly souls” are the causes of pleasure and utility friendships. Shouldn’t this mean that animals can engage in these types of friendship, which Miskawayh denied in the Refinement? I think the two passages can be rendered consistent if we suppose that in the case of pleasure and utility friendships, reason (more specifically “deliberation”) is being instrumentalized to pursue the goals of the lower soul. Thus one might use reason to consider which drinking buddy would be a better companion for tonight’s bar crawl. Animals are not capable of this, and are all the bet- ter off for it. 18 P. ADAMSON 3.3. Animal “virtue” Speaking of virtue, this is another feature of our ethical life that has a lower analogue among animals. Virtues are counted by Miskawayh among “character traits (akhlāq),” a notion whose centrality to Refine- ment is indicated by its appearance in the title of that work (Tahdhīb al-akhlāq). In his thinking about character traits Miskawayh is influ- enced by Galen, from whom he even takes the definition of “character trait” (in Greek êthos) as “a state of the soul that causes it to perform its actions without thought or deliberation (min ghayr fikr wa-lā-rawiyya)” (Ref. 31).29 Galen argued that character traits are non-rational, as we can see from the fact that animals have them. He offered a whole series of examples: the hare and deer are cowardly, the lion and dog are coura- geous, some prefer solitude and others community, some store up food for the future, and so on.30 Miskawayh agrees that animals have natural character traits, which arise out of bodily mixtures. Explaining this to al-Tawḥīdī he mentions the sneakiness of foxes, malice in wolves, the ingratiating behavior of cats, and the thieving habits of magpies (SE 63.7). Humans can even take on such traits from animals by spend- ing time with them. Supposedly, camel drivers who spend time in the wild and rarely see other humans start to act like camels (SE 63.9). Yet Miskawayh does not entirely follow Galen on this topic. He thinks that fully developed character traits only build on inborn, non- rational dispositions, like those we see in animals and also in children. These innate tendencies can be left as they are, or shaped by training (ta᾿dīb).31 It is only once they become ingrained that they are charac- ter traits in the proper sense: non-natural dispositions that include the virtues (Ref. 35, SE 63.7). Now, if virtues are inborn dispositions that have been subjected to training, then maybe animals can have virtues. 29. Directly quoted from the opening line of Galen’s treatise, edited in P. Kraus, “Kitāb al-aḫlāq li-Jālīnūs,” in: Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Egypt 5 (1937), pp. 1-51. English versions in J. N. Mattock, “A Translation From The Arabic Epitome Of Galen’s Book Peri Ethon,” in: S. M. Stern et al. (eds), Islamic Philosophy And The Classical Tradition, Oxford 1972, pp. 235-260; P. Singer (trans.), Galen: Psy- chological Writings, Cambridge 2013. See also Aristotle, History of Animals, VIII, 1, 588a for the idea of psychological traits in animals. 30. See Kraus, “Kitāb al-aḫlāq li-Jālīnūs,” pp. 25-26, translation at Singer, Galen: Psychological Writings, pp. 136-137. 31. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II, 1 is presumably Miskawayh’s source for the idea that virtue requires training.  MISKAWAYH ON ANIMALS 19 They do share the same kinds of dispositions with which we are born, and, as we have seen, some animals can be subjected to “training,” namely Miskawayh’s type (c), like horses and falcons. Miskawayh shies away from this conclusion, though. He specifies that “it is only in human beings that natural character does not manifest itself fully as it does among animals, because human beings are possessed of discernment and deliberation” (SE 63.7). In other words, only humans can modify or build on their inborn tendencies to achieve dispositions that could fittingly be called virtue.32 Similarly, in the Refinement he asks whether the “courage (shajā῾a)” of animals is real courage, and answers his own question as follows: Ref. 107: As for the courage of the lion, the elephant and such animals, it resembles courage, but it is not real (ḥaqīqiyya) courage. For these animals are confident in their strength and that it is greater than that of others, so that, when they attack, they do so not by the nature of courage but by a sense of complete strength and power and of self-confidence in prevailing. The point here, I take it, is that it does not count as courage if there is no fear or genuine danger to overcome, just as we would not call an adult human courageous for facing down a child. At one level the point is a banal one: lions and elephants are too powerful to need bravery! But Miskawayh’s conclusion also makes good sense in the light of his theory of virtue as an internal relation of soul parts. Cour- age would be reason’s restraining the fears felt in the lower soul, and animals cannot do this. As we saw with animals’ moderate approach to food and sex, they are “courageous” by nature and not through actual self-control. Extrapolating from this to the case of trained ani- mals, the fact that rationality was imposed from the outside would also mean that their docile behavior does not count as virtue. 3.4. Animal “happiness” Now that we’ve seen Miskawayh asking whether animals can participate in friendship and virtue, it may be less surprising that he poses what might otherwise have been an unexpected question: can animals be happy? Equally unsurprising is his answer, namely that they can have an 32. Or, for that matter, vice, which adds a further perspective on Miskawayh’s claim that wicked humans are worse than animals. 20 P. ADAMSON analogue of happiness, but not genuine happiness, which is achievable only by humans. Let us recall that Miskawayh recognizes two levels of happiness for humans: a lower happiness, involving rational control over the lower soul, and a higher happiness, involving grasp of intelligible truth. What animals can attain falls short of the lower human happiness: Ref. 75: Happiness is sometimes thought to belong to non-rational beings. If this is true, then it resides in preparedness to receive their completions and perfections, but without intention, deliberation, or volition. These cases of preparedness are desire, or what plays the role of desire, in rational beings [that act] by volition. Whatever animals get from eating, drinking, and being at rest ought to be called luck or happenstance, and does not deserve the name of happiness. And the same goes for humans. In other words, the satisfaction of desire does count as perfection for animals, since they only have what in us is the lower soul. Since per- fection is what makes us happy, one might call perfection in animals “happiness” too, albeit in an extended sense. Strictly speaking, though, one should reserve the word for perfection achieved through reason. A couple of passages that come later in the Refinement shed further light on this terminological nicety. Miskawayh at one point remarks dismissively that “no one ascribes happiness to the irrational animal, or to children, or to slaves, except those who are on their level (munāsiba la-hum),” because these beings are limited to bodily satis- faction (Ref. 171). Then further on, he points out that all animals are “delighted (masrūra)” with whatever food is natural for them, even if it is dung or dead bodies (Ref. 184). In both cases, his point is that animals seek perfection in that which is beneath us, or ought to be. The danger of calling mere desire satisfaction in animals “happiness” is that some people, those who are already prone to hedonism, might think that it could count as happiness for them too. But this leaves standing the point that natural functions like eating and mating are to animals what the functions of rationality are to us. They too can achieve perfection; their lives can go better or worse. 4. Justice towards animals It is in this context that we should read the scattered comments in Miskawayh expressing disapproval of abusive treatment towards ani- mals. He decries angry treatment of animals, comparing this to s­ omeone  MISKAWAYH ON ANIMALS 21 biting a lock that is proving difficult to open (Ref. 203; SE 71.2).33 And in the Refinement, he says that the just person shows justice towards “friends, family, tribe, other people who are further away still, and then to other animals” (Ref. 132-3).34 But perhaps the most interesting pas- sage on this theme is found in Stray Camels and Enclosures. He is responding to al-Tawḥīdī’s query as to why human reason bridles at things recommended by the religious Law, including animal sacrifice. Miskawayh first replies that this is just a matter of custom. Butchers don’t have a problem with slaughtering animals, because they are used to it. He then explains why it does take habituation to overcome one’s aversion to violence against animals: SE 147.4: The sense of repugnance people feel about slaughtering animals is due to the fact that they share animality (ḥayawāniyya) with them. For when something bad happens to a beast, it crosses their mind that something sim- ilar will happen to them because they share animality with it. Miskawayh repeats that this instinctive revulsion can be overcome, and the context of the passage suggests that it even should be over- come, so that ritual slaughter may be carried out. Yet his philosophy gives us plenty of reason to think that the instinct is not wrong. If animals have the capacity to experience pleasure, and to enjoy lesser versions of friendship and even happiness, then shouldn’t we regret foreclosing those opportunities by killing them? If Miskawayh fails to go that far in this passage, it is presumably in part because he doesn’t wish to question the legitimacy of killing ani- mals in keeping with the religious law. Then too, he does not really want to encourage empathy with animals, just as he does not want us to embrace the idea that a good animal life could be “happiness” in the strict sense. Though we do share a nature with them, thanks to our lower “animal” souls, we will only become worse humans by indulging that shared nature. Why then does he elsewhere say that humans should not show injustice towards animals? The ­obvious place 33. The example is from Galen’s On the Passions of the Soul, 16 Kühn, though there it is a key, not a lock. For the translation of the passage see Singer, Galen: Psychological Writings, p. 252. The same example (with a lock) is mentioned by al-Rāzī in his Spiritual Medicine. 34. Compare the image of the widening circle in the Stoic Hierocles, at A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols, Cambridge 1987, 57G; Hierocles does not however extend the circle of concern past humans. 22 P. ADAMSON to turn here is his short treatise on justice, which, like the passage on love and friendship we looked at from the Refinement, takes a very broad approach to its topic. For Miskawayh justice (῾adl) is closely related to balance (i῾tidāl), something we can see even from the Arabic words, which have the same root (as he notes at Ref. 113 and SE 29.2). Thus there is “justice” in the cosmos whenever things are in balance, even between the elements, in the sense that they exist in equal pro- portions to prevent one from overwhelming another (Just. 5r). The preservation of animal life is also mentioned as an exemplification of “natural justice” (Just. 5v). Presumably this point is applicable to the survival of individual animals and the perpetuation of entire animal species. Though it is regrettable that Miskawayh does not take the oppor- tunity to say anything here about relations of justice between humans and animals, it is still illuminating that he sees a kind of justice in the very fact of animal survival, and the natural world more generally. This is of course to be credited to God, who has set up the cosmos so that animals can flourish by attaining their perfec- tions. For example mountains exist because they steer rainfall towards plants and animals, which need the water (SE 165.2). Mis- kawayh is also sensitive to the question of why suffering sometimes befalls animals in nature, and blames it on secondary causes so as to avoid placing the blame with God (as he suggests that the occa- sionalism of kalām thinkers would force them to do, SE 173.2). All this confirms the lesson we took from the material considered above in section 3. Animals can achieve worthwhile perfection, a perfec- tion that is less than what we can achieve but more than many humans do manage to achieve. For Miskawayh, then, the fundamental reason to treat animals well would not be our natural revulsion to cruelty, but the fact that they have a natural good that they can pursue. His understanding of ani- mals is grounded in a wider teleological understanding of nature. So we are a long way here from those modern-day consequentialist argu- ments for benevolence towards animals that prioritize the minimizing of suffering. But this does not mean that our instinctive feeling of sympathy towards animals is entirely irrelevant. When we come to understand what we share with animals, we realize that their flourish- ing is akin to our flourishing, which helps us to see that it is valuable.  MISKAWAYH ON ANIMALS 23 Though I see no reason to suspect that Miskawayh is explicitly ­invoking it, we might usefully refer here to the Aristotelian theory of analogical (pros hen) predication. Animals cannot experience true pleasure, friendship, virtue, or happiness, but they do experience lesser analogues of these phenomena. Accordingly, these features of animal life are worth appreciating and preserving. Clearly Miskawayh thinks that the value of human life is inestimably greater than that of animal life, because the paradigm cases of happiness and so on are found in us, not in them.35 But it is just as clear that animal life, and animal welfare, does have real value for him. 5. Conclusion: Miskawayh and Abū Bakr al-Rāzī As noted at the beginning of this paper, Miskawayh was far from the only philosopher of the classical period to devote his attention to animals. Among the other authors mentioned above, the one who makes for the most useful comparison and contrast is al-Rāzī.36 In his work of ethical advice The Spiritual Medicine, al-Rāzī likewise adopts the tripartite theory of soul from Plato and Galen, and encourages us to resist the desires of the lower soul lest we live like animals. He also adopts the replenishment theory of pleasure, adhering to this more consistently than Miskawayh, and taking it to be a powerful refutation of hedonism. Indeed, at Pleas. 11, when Miskawayh ascribes this theory to certain “naturalists,” one may wonder whether he has al-Rāzī in mind. Thus the negative attitudes towards animal nature reviewed in section 1 are largely anticipated by al-Rāzī. Yet al-Rāzī also expresses positive views on animals, in particular when he condemns mistreatment of them in a well-known passage of his Philosophical Way of Life. This opens by invoking as a general principle that “we ought never to cause any pain to any sentient being, unless it is deserved by it, or in order that by this pain we can 35. Actually, this is not quite true: the paradigm case of pleasure, goodness, and perfection is not the happy human, but God (Pleas. 8). So I would tentatively suggest that humans relate to God as animals do to humans: that is, by exemplifying a lower but still genuine form of a higher perfection. 36. For what follows see P. Adamson, “Abū Bakr al-Rāzī on Animals,” (cf. supra n. 3), and P. Adamson, Al-Rāzī, New York 2021, sections 3.3 and 8.4. 24 P. ADAMSON avert from it some other pain which is worse.”37 “Justice” is violated by people who hunt for pleasure or overwork beasts of burden. Al-Rāzī allows violence to animals only when necessary, for instance to save the life of a human, or because the animals themselves do more harm than good. As regards our behavior, then, al-Rāzī and Miskawayh agree: the rules of justice forbid senseless abuse of ani- mals. But if the argument of this paper has been correct, Miskwayh’s rationale for this ethical demand is different from al-Rāzī’s. In the Philosophical Way of Life, al-Rāzī is happy to lean on our intuition that suffering is intrinsically bad, and he encourages us to imitate God by preventing suffering insofar as is possible. So far as we can tell from the very incomplete remains of his philosophical corpus, al-Rāzī does not explore teleology and the theme of natural animal perfection.38 In his thinking about animals, Miskawayh was influ- enced by the same Greek sources that were central for al-Rāzī, namely Plato and Galen. But ultimately his understanding of animal value was shaped more by the Aristotelian idea that animals have natural purposes, purposes that are analogous to our own, and whose pursuit should not be thwarted without good reason.39 Peter Adamson Lehrstuhl VI für spätantike und arabische Philosophie Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 München [email protected] 37. P. Kraus (ed.), Abū Bakr al-Rāzī: Rasā᾿il falsafiyya, Cairo 1939, p. 103; the work is translated in J. McGinnis and D. R. Reisman (eds. and trans.), Classical Arabic Phi- losophy: An Anthology of Sources, Indianapolis 2007. While this passage may sound conse- quentialist, I have argued in Adamson, Al-Rāzī, section 8.3, that this is not the right way to read his ethics as a whole. 38. Indeed, in the treatise that has come down to us under the title On Metaphysics, al-Rāzī even argues against teleological accounts of nature; see Kraus (ed.), Abū Bakr al-Rāzī: Rasā᾿il falsafiyya, pp. 116-124. 39. This paper benefited immensely from discussion and feedback from three anony- mous referees from the journal, and from the members of a research team involved in a project at LMU Munich, which supported the writing of this paper and its open access publication: “Animals in the Philosophy of the Islamic World,” funded under the Euro- pean Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement num- ber 786762).