Submitted by Michael Neininger
on
Tim Bourns: Animal Minds in the Medieval North
This lecture argues that Old Norse narrative offers a counter-tradition to medieval and early modern philosophy by repeatedly attributing intelligence, wisdom, reason, communicative intent, and ethical awareness to animals, thereby destabilizing the category of the human itself. Against Aristotelian hierarchies and Cartesian dismissal of the ‘rational animal’, the Icelandic sagas deploy natural, preternatural, and supernatural animal minds as a rigorous literary experiment grounded in narrative rather than abstraction, anticipating posthumanist critiques of human exceptionalism nearly a millennium in advance.