Within scholastics, how does animals' perception work, when compared to humans' apprehension of universals?

Question

In the study of scholastic philosophy, I'm struggling with this question for a while:

It seems like dogs do know what dogs are. Aquinas states that animals have perception, capable of complex cognition:

By definition, the living things that we call animals are those that have the power of perception. Aquinas accepts the conventional list of the five senses [..] Beyond these five external senses are the four internal senses that use the brain as their organ.[..] the common sense; imagination (or phantasia); the estimative (or cogitative) power; memory. [..] Aquinas thinks that a great deal of complex cognition occurs within the internal senses of the brain, but that those material powers are incapable of abstract thought. To be more precise, he thinks that material cognitive powers can represent things only as particulars, and that universal concepts can be formed only within the immaterial intellect.

My question is: How does scholastic philosophy deal with animal perception so that, for example, a dog that has been abused by human beings avoids any other human? And how is this compared with human intelectual capacities for apprehending universals?

I heard that animals live in a stimulity instead of a reality (according to Xavier Zubiri), but I would like to understand a little better how this would fit in the distinction between animal perception and human intellect.

Answer 1

Your question seems to be more about animal psychology than philosophy. Dogs certainly understand quite abstract concepts. I can give you two examples. One dog I owned understood the command 'go round' to mean that they should run around whatever large feature was close by, perhaps a pond or a clump of bushes or a building etc. He also understood the command 'out' to mean that he should withdraw through an opening in a boundary of some sort- that could be a door in a building, an opening in a hedge, a gate in a fence, and so on. These commands would work even in novel surroundings, so he had not learned them just in relation to specific individual circumstances.

Answer 2

_{EDIT: This answer may get outdated after OP's edit, it was written for Within scholastics, how do animals apprehend universals, when compared to human beings?}

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From Soul and Body in Thomas Aquinas' SEP entry, it seems that, for him, animals don't aprehend universals at all, since they don't reason, just perceive:

For living things, their substantial form is their soul (anima). In saying this, Aquinas should not be understood to be ascribing some special sort of spirituality to plants and animals: he thinks they are material objects just as much as rocks and streams are. Rather, he is following the lead of Aristotle’s De anima in treating the soul as the first principle of life, whatever that may be. [..] The ongoing existence of living things also requires that they carry out distinctive operations: taking nourishment and reproducing, moving and perceiving (in the case of animals), and reasoning (in the human case).

Perception amounts to evidence from the senses and its byproducts:

By definition, the living things that we call animals are those that have the power of perception. Aquinas accepts the conventional list of the five senses [..] Beyond these five external senses are the four internal senses that use the brain as their organ.[..] the common sense; imagination (or phantasia); the estimative (or cogitative) power; memory.

The discovery of universals is a privilege of thought (italic and bold mine):

Aquinas thinks that a great deal of complex cognition occurs within the internal senses of the brain, but that those material powers are incapable of abstract thought. To be more precise, he thinks that material cognitive powers can represent things only as particulars, and that universal concepts can be formed only within the immaterial intellect. He writes, If the intellective soul were composed of form and matter, then the forms of things would be received in it as individuals; then it would cognize only singular things, as happens in the sensory capacities, which receive the forms of things in a corporeal organ. (ST 1a 75.5c)

Answer 3

Late to the game here, and I'll confine myself to Aquinas: all powers have distinct 'objects', that is - what they are directed toward in some basic way and this is a principled way to distinguish powers from each other. The object of sight is 'color' and hearing 'sound'. The internal sense powers have their own objects too. Dogs have all five external senses and the four internal ones. The common sense unifies the external sense into one phenemonal experience, but the external thing must be present for the common sense to be activated. It's 'object' is the sensible form of the external thing, in a receptive way. Then the imagination makes a 'phantasm', a sense image, which retains that sensible form. Then the other two internal powers, memory and the estimative power (for dogs - for humans this is called the cogitative power) get involved. The external senses and the common sense only deal with 'per se sensibles' - that is the external accidents that are currently sensed: say, some noise or color. The estimative power and memory, by contrast are directed toward, and take as their object, non-sensed intentions (intentiones). These 'intentions' alert the percipient to features that are not available simply to the senses: the noise communicated to the senses thereby becomes meaningful. Thomas will talk about dogs barking, with one dog being able to a) hear another one barking and b) recognizing that the sensed dog is angry. The first (a) occurs by the external sense (hearing) and the common sense. The second, (b), occurs by the estimative power: the dog interprets the meaning of the sound as threatening, attractive, angry, etc, which is content not available to the external senses or the common sense. That estimative power receives the intention, which is not itself directly sensed and the memory stores it.

So, to your actual question: a dog would have sense impression of a human hurting it (perhaps once or multiple times), impinging on its sense of touch. It would feel the hit or prick. This then gets interpreted as pain, which is bad, by the estimative power and stored as such in the memory, and the complex feeling and consequent meaning of the human hitting or poking the dog is stored in memory. The dog can then sense a human and associate that thing (the human) with the pain received. This (the interaction between memory and estimative power (cogitative for humans)) is where what we call trauma would be localized, I think.

While there is no understanding of a universal for the dog, they can (on Thomas's account and others') clearly operate by way of larger groupings. Dogs clearly distinguish between kinds of things (cats, humans, squirrels) and know how to achieve ends (there is clearly know-how), but they don't have a linguistic utterance on this account. So, there's a recognition of the human as a sort of thing and distinguished from other sorts, but not a definition (say, 'humans are rational animals'). They can see triangular things and manipulate them for their own ends, but never arrive at, say, the Pythagorean theorem. So there's no 'understanding of universals' but there is clearly on this account a recognition of groups and items that are in that group.