On Medieval Rationality

Recent scholarship has focused on the notion of ‘rationality’ and the consequences of different conceptions to the characterization of the human-animal divide. In this article, I attempt to further muddle the waters by considering examples of stricter requirements being imposed on what counts to be rational. I argue that whereas many medieval authors were willing to identify similarities in the way humans and non-human animals behave and process information, they also tended to emphasize the differences in those processes: human processes are inherently rational (or rational-oriented), while those of other animals may resemble rational processes but are not rational. I further claim that this evidence should lead scholars to be less generous in their attribution of rationality to non-human animals to avoid trivializing that notion.