Types of Animals Named for Philosophers
Which philosopher has a species of extinct horned armadillo named for him?
Here’s an illustration of the creature, in case you’d like to see one:
(via Wikipedia)
Here’s a hint: you might, because of the ears, be leaning towards Schopenhauer, and I can see that…
…but that’s not correct.
Here’s another hint: fossils of the armadillo were discovered in Argentina and Chile, places the philosopher for whom it is named never visited.
That narrows it down, and I’m sure you’re on the cusp of guessing.
Here’s another hint of questionable value: this philosopher also has a species of extinct wasp named for him.
The only known fossils of this wasp were found trapped in amber. Here’s a photo:
Got it yet?
OK, to prevent this post from moving from “maybe amusing” to “definitely annoying,” here is a hint that may actually be of use: the wasp fossil was found in Kaliningrad.
Obviously I needn’t say more.
Though I suppose I should tell you the names of the species. The armadillo is Epipeltephilus kanti and the wasp is Palaeorhoptrocentrus kanti.
To see images of the philosopher these animals were named for, see this post.
What other types of animals are named for philosophers?
This post was prompted by a recent article at LitHub on insects named after writers. The author, James Folta, notes that a kind of bug was named for Diogenes, the Cretaceous lacewing larva Hallucinochrysa diogenesi, who “camouflaged itself by covering its body with debris.” But that’s the only philosopher included on his list.
But certainly there have been other animals named for philosophers. Let’s crowdsource this important trivia, folks. Tell us what you know.
Several species of hermit crab in the crustacean genus Diogenes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_(crustacean)
“Plato is a genus of ray spider (family Theridiosomatidae). The American biologist Jonathan A. Coddington named and circumscribed the genus in 1986.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato_(spider)
If we’re including species that bear the names of the naturalists who classified and described them prior to around 1830, or were subsequently named in honor of people who discovered or described similar species prior to around 1830, then basically all of these are named for philosophers, since classifying and describing species was within the purview of a certain subset of philosophers, namely natural philosophers. For at least a few hundred years, from the Renaissance until the 19th century, natural philosophy was the *primary* sense of “philosophy”, to the extent that if you said “philosophy”, but meant by it something other than naming and describing mites and so on, then you typically had to clarify that that was your intention. So we have the Aphaenops bonneti, named for Charles Bonnet; we have the Leeuwenhoekia genus of mites; the Swammerdamia genus of moths (we also have the Monas minima, a species of Protists that Otto Friedrich Müller named not directly after Leibniz, but at least in honor of Leibniz, as an example of a Kant-style “physical monad”). The list, if we construe philosophy in this way, would be too long to be interesting; if we construe it according to the currently prevailing definition, as excluding natural philosophers, then the list is probably too short to be interesting.
This is why Neal Stephenson is a phil-fi author as well as a sci-fi author.
A pseudoscorpion (Neobisium mendelssohni) is named for Moses Mendelssohn.
The common (or European) shag, a type of cormorant, is named Gulosus aristotelis.
More wasps named after philosophers:
Charops cavendishae (named for Margaret Cavendish)
Gonatocerus brunoi (named for Giordano Bruno)
Gonatocerus comptei (named after Auguste Comte)
Gonatocerus goethei (named after Goethe)
Aristotle’s catfish, Silurus aristotelis. Allan Gotthelf, in his book Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Biology, says: “In [History of Animals VIII 621a20-b2] … Aristotle reports that in the catfish (called glanis in Greek), once the eggs are deposited the female swims off and the male stands guard over the spawn. This is in fact not true of the large European catfish with which early modern zoologists were familiar, so they dismissed Aristotle’s claim. But the famous nineteenth‐century Swiss biologist, Louis Agassiz, who had emigrated to America, discovered there a species of catfish in which the male did just that. He remembered his Aristotle and contacted a colleague in Greece, whom he asked to look further. Sometime before 1857 this colleague found in a northern Greek river, often referred to by Aristotle (the Achiloos River), a smaller species of catfish in which the males protected the young in just the way reported, and sent over to Agassiz a specimen of that species. Agassiz was entitled to give the fish its official Latin name, and he chose Parasilurus aristotelis.”
Sadly, I can find no animal (let alone a fly) named after Socrates. There is a tachinid fly named after Archytas of Tarentum, a Pythagorean for whom there’s an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia. The fly is called Archytas apicifer.
Acosmeryx socrates is a moth in the family Sphingidae and is native to the Philippines. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acosmeryx_socrates for a photo.)
More philosophical wasps: Polynema spenceri (for Herbert Spencer), Polynema thoreauini (Henry David Thoreau), Epiquadrastichus emersoni and Leptacis kierkegaardi. There’s a genus of wasp called Marxiana Girault.
Several of these were named by the American entomologist and poet Alexandre Arsène Girault (1884-1941), who specialized in wasps and “described over 3000 new taxa in Australia” (according to his Wikipedia entry). He seems to have been a renegade entomologist who rebelled against “economic entomology” (the field’s subordination to industrial purposes).
Three named for Nietzsche (not by Girault): the spider Orcevia nietzschei, the ladybug Orcus nietzschei, and the beetle Nietzscheana Zubov.
I can weirdly contribute to this one since I have a species named after me: Anncy’s mayfly (a morphospecies of koorrnonga, found in Tasmania). A relic of my father’s entomology hobby and publications.
I am months late to this party, but I just realized that we had omitted a big one, a whole (small) dinosaur genus: Confuciornis sanctus.
Well, two, I guess, but this other one feels a bit like cheating: Eoconfuciusornis zhengi.