Hard to be a philosopher while having to invent philosophy in your head without hearing or speaking with anyone or reading anything. How good of a mathematician can someone become if they have to invent mathematics on a silent island with no books or even their parents teaching them to count? Without language, this is the situation an elephant-philosopher is in...<p>I heard an interesting argument for what a chance occurrence language is in humans: after all we talk by using the organs we chew with,  fashioning our lips and tongues into phonemes.<p>If the freak &quot;language gene&quot;  were given to elephants (spliced into DNA etc) so that they can develop phonemic values over generations using whatever speechlike abilities their mouths do have, it would be interesting to note whether they can develop philosophy then.<p>But man had modern brain and speech abilities for tens of thousands of years before our cultural situation and heritage became interesting.  You likely wouldn&#x27;t be impressed with the philosophical world view of members of an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe tens of thousands of years ago who had no writing. Interesting, surely, but as an curiosity.  Would speaking elephants left to their own devices be the same? Or do humans have higher cognitive processes they cannot match,  in addition to lacking our language skills? So that they would not be put at a prototypical human level,  but insteqd forever stuck at the elephant level,  their new language ability notwithstanding...