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helped us to understand better certain imperceptible differences concealed by these discussions that, as it usually happens with medieval stuff, at first glance look like the stubborn repetition of the same archetypical model. |
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Medieval scholars were not lacking texts on animal behavior. Only late Schoolmen knew Aristotle's Historia animalium, but, through the mediation of Pliny and of Ammonius, they knew various discussions about the natural characteristics of dogs, not to mention the problem of the voice of fishes and birds (including parrots and magpies). |
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Likewise, something must have filtered down from the discussion which took place among Stoics, Academicians, and Epicureans about the possibility of an "animal logos." Sextus Empiricus says (Pyrr. 1.1.6567) that the dogs manifest, through their behavior, various capacities of reflection and apprehension. Sextus quotes an observation of Crysippus, according to which, when a dog follows his prey and arrives at a place where three roads meet, having sniffed the two ways by which its victim has not passed, makes a perfect dialectical syllogism: "the beast has passed either by here, or by there or by some other part." It is controversial whether Sextus was known by the Middle Ages or not, but it is worth noticing that the same argument can be found in the Bestiary of Cambridge. That the idea does not appear in Isidore or in the Physiologus means that a great part of the Greek discussion had filtered in some way through other secondary sources. |
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All this mass of "naturalistic" observation survived in some way in the work of philosophers tied, through the mediation of Augustine, to the Stoic legacy. However, in general, every appearance of the dog is dependent on that page of Aristotle's De interpretatione (16a and following), which influenced enormously the whole medieval discussion on human and animal language. Thus the dog circulates in the philosophical and linguistic literature mainly as a barking animal, making noise along with parrots, cockssometimes along with the gemitus infirmorum, sometimes under a separate heading. The barking of the dog, born as a topos, a topos remains. Nevertheless, the authority has a nose of wax, and below and beyond any literal appearance, every time the topos is quoted again, one is entitled to suspect that a slight shift of perspective has taken place. |
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To justify the embarrassing position of the latratus canis in the medieval theories of language, one should remember that Greek semiotics, from |
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