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  1. Persons, Animals, Ourselves.Paul F. Snowdon (ed.) - 2014 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    What kind of thing are we? Paul Snowdon's answer is that we are animals, of a sort. This view--'animalism'--may seem obvious but on the whole philosophers have rejected it. Snowdon argues that animalism is a defensible way of thinking about ourselves. Its rejection rests on the tendency when doing philosophy to mistake fantasy for reality.
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  • The Role of Kinds in the Semantics of Ceteris Paribus Laws.Bernhard Nickel - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (10):1729-1744.
    This paper investigates the interaction between semantic theories for cp-laws (roughly, laws that hold “all things equal”) and metaphysical theories of kinds in the special sciences. Its central conclusion is that cp-laws concerning kinds behave differently from cp-laws concerning non-kinds: “ravens are black” which concerns the kind corvus corax, behaves differently from from “albino ravens are white” which concerns the non-kind grouping of albino ravens. I argue that this difference is in the first instance logical: the two sorts of cp-laws (...)
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  • You Needn't Be Simple.Andrew M. Bailey - 2014 - Philosophical Papers 43 (2):145-160.
    Here's an interesting question: what are we? David Barnett has claimed that reflection on consciousness suggests an answer: we are simple. Barnett argues that the mereological simplicity of conscious beings best explains the Datum: that no pair of persons can itself be conscious. In this paper, I offer two alternative explanations of the Datum. If either is correct, Barnett's argument fails. First, there aren't any such things as pairs of persons. Second, consciousness is maximal; no conscious thing is a proper (...)
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  • (1 other version)Externalism and Brain Transplants.Rory Madden - 2011 - In Karen Bennett & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 6. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
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  • A conceptualist argument for a spiritual substantial soul.J. P. Moreland - 2013 - Religious Studies 49 (1):35-43.
    I advance a type of conceptualist argument for substance dualism – minimally, the view that we are spiritual substances that have bodies – based on the understandability of what it would be for something to be a spirit, e.g. what it would be for God to be a spirit. After presenting the argument formally, I clarify and defend its various premises with a special focus on what I take to be the most controversial one, namely, if thinking matter is metaphysically (...)
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  • Quantificational structures and compositionality.Barbara H. Partee - 1995 - In Emmon W. Bach, Eloise Jelinek, Angelika Kratzer & Barbara H. Partee (eds.), Quantification in Natural Languages. Dordrecht, Netherland: Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 541--601.
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  • Technology and the Future of Persons.Lynne Rudder Baker - 2013 - The Monist 96 (1):37-53.
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  • You 're an animal, plain and simple'.Jimmy Alfonso Licon - 2014 - Think 13 (36):61-70.
    In this essay, I argue that we are merely biological organisms. This view (animalism) explains everyday practices like watching ourselves in the mirror. The claim that we are psychological in nature cannot explain something as trivial as watching ourselves in the mirror. Thus, we should accept animalism.
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  • The Argument for Subject Body Dualism from Transtemporal Identity Defended.Martine Nida-Rümelin - 2013 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (3):702-714.
    In my argument for subject body dualism criticized by Ludwig I use the locution of a genuine and factual difference between two possibilities. Ludwig distinguishes three interpretations of this locution. According to his analysis the argument does not go through on any of these interpretations. In my response I agree that the argument is unsuccessful if ‘factual difference’ is understood in the first way. The second reading—according to a plausible understanding—cannot be used for the argument either. The discussion of this (...)
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  • A new argument for animalism.Stephan Blatti - 2012 - Analysis 72 (4):685-690.
    The view known as animalism asserts that we are human animals—that each of us is an instance of the Homo sapiens species. The standard argument for this view is known as the thinking animal argument . But this argument has recently come under attack. So, here, a new argument for animalism is introduced. The animal ancestors argument illustrates how the case for animalism can be seen to piggyback on the credibility of evolutionary theory. Two objections are then considered and answered.
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  • The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life.Jeff McMahan - 2002 - New York, US: OUP Usa.
    A comprehensive study of the ethics of killing in cases in which the metaphysical or moral status of the individual killed is uncertain or controversial. Among those beings whose status is questionable or marginal in this way are human embryos and fetuses, newborn infants, animals, anencephalic infants, human beings with severe congenital and cognitive impairments, and human beings who have become severely demented or irreversibly comatose. In an effort to understand the moral status of these beings, this book develops and (...)
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  • We Are Not Human Beings.Derek Parfit - 2012 - Philosophy 87 (1):5-28.
    We can start with some science fiction. Here on Earth, I enter the Teletransporter. When I press some button, a machine destroys my body, while recording the exact states of all my cells. This information is sent by radio to Mars, where another machine makes, out of organic materials, a perfect copy of my body. The person who wakes up on Mars seems to remember living my life up to the moment when I pressed the button, and is in every (...)
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  • The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases.Irene Heim - 1982 - Dissertation, Umass Amherst
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  • Objects and Persons.Trenton Merricks - 2001 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Objects and Persons presents an original theory about what kinds of things exist. Trenton Merricks argues that there are no non-living inanimate macrophysical objects -- no statues or rocks or chairs or stars -- because they would have no causal role over and above the causal role of their microphysical parts. Humans do exist: we have non-redundant causal powers. Along the way, Merricks has interesting things to say about mental causation, free will, and various philosophical puzzles. Anyone working in metaphysics (...)
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  • Simple Generics.David Liebesman - 2010 - Noûs 45 (3):409-442.
    Consensus has it that generic sentences such as “Dogs bark” and “Birds fly” contain, at the level of logical form, an unpronounced generic operator: Gen. On this view, generics have a tripartite structure similar to overtly quantified sentences such as “Most dogs bark” and “Typically, birds fly”. I argue that Gen doesn’t exist and that generics have a simple bipartite structure on par with ordinary atomic sentences such as “Homer is drinking”. On my view, the subject terms of generics are (...)
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  • A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation.Hans Kamp - 2002 - In Paul H. Portner & Barbara H. Partee (eds.), Formal Semantics - the Essential Readings. Blackwell. pp. 189--222.
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  • Generics and defaults.Francis Jeffry Pelletier & Nicholas Asher - 1997 - In J. F. A. K. Van Benthem, Johan van Benthem & Alice G. B. Ter Meulen (eds.), Handbook of Logic and Language. Elsevier.
    1: Linguistic and Epistemological Background 1 . 1 : Generic Reference vs. Generic Predication 1 . 2 : Why are there any Generic Sentences at all? 1 . 3 : Generics and Exceptions, Two Bad Attitudes 1 . 4 : Exceptions and Generics, Some Other Attitudes 1 . 5 : Generics and Intensionality 1 . 6 : Goals of an Analysis of Generic Sentences 1 . 7 : A Little Notation 1 . 8 : Generics vs. Explicit Statements of Regularities..
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  • Twinning, inorganic replacement, and the organism view.S. Matthew Liao - 2010 - Ratio 23 (1):59-72.
    In explicating his version of the Organism View, Eric Olson argues that you begin to exist only after twinning is no longer possible and that you cannot survive a process of inorganic replacement. Assuming the correctness of the Organism View, but pace Olson, I argue in this paper that the Organism View does not require that you believe either proposition. The claim I shall make about twinning helps to advance a debate that currently divides defenders of the Organism View, while (...)
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  • Adverbs of quantification.David K. Lewis - 1975 - In Edward Louis Keenan (ed.), Formal semantics of natural language: papers from a colloquium sponsored by the King's College Research Centre, Cambridge. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 3--15.
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  • Natural goodness.Philippa Foot - 2001 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Philippa Foot has for many years been one of the most distinctive and influential thinkers in moral philosophy. Long dissatisfied with the moral theories of her contemporaries, she has gradually evolved a theory of her own that is radically opposed not only to emotivism and prescriptivism but also to the whole subjectivist, anti-naturalist movement deriving from David Hume. Dissatisfied with both Kantian and utilitarian ethics, she claims to have isolated a special form of evaluation that predicates goodness and defect only (...)
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  • (1 other version)An argument for animalism.Eric T. Olson - unknown
    The view that we are human animals, " animalism ", is deeply unpopular. This paper explains what that claim says and why it is so contentious. It then argues that those who deny it face an awkward choice. They must either deny that there are any human animals, deny that human animals can think, or deny that we are the thinking things located where we are.
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  • (1 other version)Restricted composition.Ned Markosian - 2008 - In Theodore Sider, John P. Hawthorne & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Contemporary debates in metaphysics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 341--63.
    Let’s begin with a simple example. Consider two quarks: one near the tip of your nose, the other near the center of Alpha Centauri. Here is a question about these two subatomic particles: Is there an object that has these two quarks as its parts and that has no other parts? According to one view of the matter (a view that is surprisingly endorsed by a great many contemporary philosophers), the answer to this question is Yes. But I think it (...)
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  • The organism view defended.S. Matthew Liao - 2006 - The Monist 89 (3):334-350.
    What are you and I essentially? When do you and I come into and go out of existence? A common response is that we are essentially organisms, that is, we come into existence as organisms and go out of existence when we cease to be organisms. Jeff McMahan has put forward two arguments against the Organism View: the case of dicephalus and a special case of hemispheric commissurotomy. In this paper, I defend the Organism View against these two cases. Because (...)
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  • The nature of ability and the purpose of knowledge.John Greco - 2007 - Philosophical Issues 17 (1):57–69.
    The claim that knowledge is a kind of success from ability has great theoretical power: it explains the nature of epistemic normativity, why knowledge is incompatible with luck, and why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief. This paper addresses objections to the view by wedding it with two additional ideas: that intellectual abilities display a certain structure, and that the concept of knowledge functions to flag good information, and good sources of information, for use in practical reasoning.
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  • The self and the future.Bernard Williams - 1970 - Philosophical Review 79 (2):161-180.
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  • There are no criteria of identity over time.Trenton Merricks - 1998 - Noûs 32 (1):106-124.
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  • (2 other versions)Generics: Cognition and acquisition.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2008 - Philosophical Review 117 (1):1-47.
    Ducks lay eggs' is a true sentence, and `ducks are female' is a false one. Similarly, `mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus' is obviously true, whereas `mosquitoes don't carry the West Nile virus' is patently false. This is so despite the egg-laying ducks' being a subset of the female ones and despite the number of mosquitoes that don't carry the virus being ninety-nine times the number that do. Puzzling facts such as these have made generic sentences defy adequate semantic treatment. (...)
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  • What is animalism?Jens Johansson - 2007 - Ratio 20 (2):194–205.
    One increasingly popular approach to personal identity is called ‘animalism.’ Unfortunately, it is unclear just what the doctrine says. In this paper, I criticise several different ways of stating animalism, and put forward one formulation that I find more promising.
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  • You are simple.David Barnett - 2010 - In Robert C. Koons & George Bealer (eds.), The waning of materialism. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 161--174.
    I argue that, unlike your brain, you are not composed of other things: you are simple. My argument centers on what I take to be an uncontroversial datum: for any pair of conscious beings, it is impossible for the pair itself to be conscious. Consider, for instance, the pair comprising you and me. You might pinch your arm and feel a pain. I might simultaneously pinch my arm and feel a qualitatively identical pain. But the pair we form would not (...)
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  • Animalism, dicephalus, and borderline cases.Stephan Blatti - 2007 - Philosophical Psychology 20 (5):595-608.
    The rare condition known as dicephalus occurs when (prior to implantation) a zygote fails to divide completely, resulting in twins who are conjoined below the neck. Human dicephalic twins look like a two-headed person, with each brain supporting a distinct mental life. Jeff McMahan has recently argued that, because they instance two of us but only one animal, dicephalic twins provide a counterexample to the animalist's claim that each of us is identical with a human animal. To the contrary, I (...)
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  • Persons, animals, and identity.Sydney Shoemaker - 2007 - Synthese 162 (3):313 - 324.
    The paper is concerned with how neo-Lockean accounts of personal identity should respond to the challenge of animalist accounts. Neo-Lockean accounts that hold that persons can change bodies via brain transplants or cerebrum transplants are committed to the prima facie counterintuitive denial that a person is an (biologically individuated) animal. This counterintuitiveness can be defused by holding that a person is biological animal (on neo-Lockean views) if the “is” is the “is” of constitution rather than the “is” of identity, and (...)
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  • Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity.Sydney Shoemaker (ed.) - 1963 - Ithaca, N.Y.,: Cornell University Press.
    Provides links to Internet resources in the field of international relations. Includes resources on diplomacy, history, and politics; economics and international management; international law; international organizations; regional studies; research institutes; United States government resources; and more.
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  • The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology.Eric Todd Olson - 1997 - New York, US: Oxford University Press.
    Most philosophers writing about personal identity in recent years claim that what it takes for us to persist through time is a matter of psychology. In this groundbreaking new book, Eric Olson argues that such approaches face daunting problems, and he defends in their place a radically non-psychological account of personal identity. He defines human beings as biological organisms, and claims that no psychological relation is either sufficient or necessary for an organism to persist. Olson rejects several famous thought-experiments dealing (...)
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  • (1 other version)Personal identity and brain transplants.Paul F. Snowdon - 1991 - In Human Beings. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 109-126.
    My topic is personal identity, or rather, our identity. There is general, but not, of course, unanimous, agreement that it is wrong to give an account of what is involved in, and essential to, our persistence over time which requires the existence of immaterial entities, but, it seems to me, there is no consensus about how, within, what might be called this naturalistic framework, we should best procede. This lack of consensus, no doubt, reflects the difficulty, which must strike anyone (...)
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  • Personal identity, memory, and the problem of circularity.John Perry - 1975 - In Personal Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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  • (1 other version)Animalism.Stephan Blatti - 2006 - In A. C. Grayling, Andrew Pyle & Naomi Goulder (eds.), The Continuum encyclopedia of British philosophy. Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum.
    This entry sketches the theory of personal identity that has come to be known as animalism. Animalism’s hallmark claim is that each of us is identical with a human animal. Moreover, animalists typically claim that we could not exist except as animals, and that the (biological) conditions of our persistence derive from our status as animals. Prominent advocates of this view include Michael Ayers, Eric Olson, Paul Snowdon, Peter van Inwagen, and David Wiggins.
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  • I do not exist.Peter K. Unger - 1979 - In Graham Macdonald (ed.), Perception and Identity. London: Cornell University Press.
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  • Why there are no people.Peter Unger - 1979 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (1):177-222.
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  • Why there still are no people.Jim Stone - 2005 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (1):174-191.
    This paper argues that there are no people. If identity isn't what matters in survival, psychological connectedness isn't what matters either. Further, fissioning cases do not support the claim that connectedness is what matters. I consider Peter Unger's view that what matters is a continuous physical realization of a core psychology. I conclude that if identity isn't what matters in survival, nothing matters. This conclusion is deployed to argue that there are no people. Objections to Eliminativism are considered, especially that (...)
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  • (1 other version)Survival and identity.David Lewis - 1976 - In Amélie Rorty (ed.), The Identities of Persons. University of California Press. pp. 17-40.
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  • (1 other version)Personal identity.Derek Parfit - 1971 - Philosophical Review 80 (January):3-27.
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  • (1 other version)Real People: Personal Identity Without Thought Experiments.Kathleen V. Wilkes - 1988 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    This book explores the scope and limits of the concept of personDS a vexed question in contemporary philosophy. The author begins by questioning the methodology of thought-experimentation, arguing that it engenders inconclusive and unconvincing results, and that truth is stranger than fiction. She then examines an assortment of real-life conditions, including infancy, insanity andx dementia, dissociated states, and split brains. The popular faith in continuity of consciousness, and the unity of the person is subjected to sustained criticism. The author concludes (...)
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  • Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism.Ruth Garrett Millikan - 1984 - MIT Press.
    Preface by Daniel C. Dennett Beginning with a general theory of function applied to body organs, behaviors, customs, and both inner and outer representations, ...
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  • Against materialism.Alvin Plantinga - 2006 - Faith and Philosophy 23 (1):3-32.
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  • Animalism is Either False of Uninteresting (Perhaps Both).Matt Duncan - 2021 - American Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2):187-200.
    “We are animals.” That’s what animalists say—that’s their slogan. But what animalists mean by their slogan varies. Many animalists are adamant that what they mean—and, indeed, what the true animalist thesis is—is that we are identical to animals (human animals, to be precise). But others say that’s not enough. They say that the animalist thesis has to be something more—perhaps that we are essentially or most fundamentally human animals. This paper argues that, depending on how we understand it, animalism is (...)
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  • (1 other version)Externalism and Brain Transplants.Rory Madden - 2011 - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 6.
    The animalist view of personal identity, according to which we human persons are identical to animals, is arguably the simplest view of the relationship between human persons and animals. But animalism faces a serious challenge from the possibility of brain transplants. This chapter develops, on behalf of animalism, a new way of modeling such cases. The model is developed by analogy with situations of environmentally determined reference shift familiar from the literature on externalism in the philosophy of mind and language. (...)
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  • A Materialist Metaphysics of the Human Person.Hud Hudson - 2001 - Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
    Hud Hudson presents an innovative view of the metaphysics of human persons according to which human persons are material objects but not human organisms. In developing his account, he formulates and defends a unique collection of positions on parthood, persistence, vagueness, composition, identity, and various puzzles of material constitution. The author also applies his materialist metaphysics to issues in ethics and in the philosophy of religion. He examines the implications for ethics of his metaphysical views for standard arguments addressing the (...)
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  • Material Beings.Peter Van Inwagen - 1990 - Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
    According to Peter van Inwagen, visible inanimate objects do not, strictly speaking, exist. In defending this controversial thesis, he offers fresh insights on such topics as personal identity, commonsense belief, existence over time, the phenomenon of vagueness, and the relation between metaphysics and ordinary language.
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  • The Feeling Animal.Andrew M. Bailey & Allison Krile Thornton - 2020 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 7:554-567.
    For good or for ill, we have animal bodies. Through them, we move around, eat and drink, and do many other things besides. We owe much – perhaps our very lives – to these ever-present animals. But how exactly do we relate to our animals? Are we parts of them, or they of us? Do we and these living animals co-inhere or constitute or coincide? Or what? Animalism answers that we are identical to them. There are many objections to animalism, (...)
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  • Conjoined twinning & biological individuation.Alexandria Boyle - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (8):2395-2415.
    In dicephalus conjoined twinning, it appears that two heads share a body; in cephalopagus, it appears that two bodies share a head. How many human animals are present in these cases? One answer is that there are two in both cases—conjoined twins are precisely that, conjoined twins. Another is that the number of humans corresponds to the number of bodies—so there is one in dicephalus and two in cephalopagus. I show that both of these answers are incorrect. Prominent accounts of (...)
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