
HoP 092 - King of Animals - Porphyry
History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
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Porphyry's Arguments for Vegetarianism
Porphyry recommends vegetarianism only for those people who are actually trying to concentrate on intellectual activity rather than their embodied lives. To eat meat, of course, you have to kill a sentient being. Porphyry follows Stoic ideas about rationality when trying to prove this. He may not really believe that animals are rational in any sense a Platonist would recognize.
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