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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/25/2016, SPi
Animalism
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/25/2016, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/25/2016, SPi
Animalism
New Essays on Persons,
Animals, and Identity
edited by
Stephan Blatti
and Paul F. Snowdon
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/25/2016, SPi
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/25/2016, SPi
Contents
1. Introduction 1
Stephan Blatti and Paul F. Snowdon
Part I
2. We Are Not Human Beings 31
Derek Parfit
3. Animalism vs. Constitutionalism 50
Lynne Rudder Baker
4. Constitution and the Debate between Animalism and
Psychological Views 64
Denis Robinson
5. Remnant Persons: Animalism’s Undoing 89
Mark Johnston
6. Thinking Animals Without Animalism 128
Sydney Shoemaker
Part II
7. The Remnant-Person Problem 145
Eric T. Olson
8. Headhunters 162
Stephan Blatti
9. Thinking Parts 180
Rory Madden
10. Four-Dimensional Animalism 208
David B. Hershenov
Part III
11. Animalism and the Varieties of Conjoined Twinning 229
Tim Campbell and Jeff McMahan
12. A Case in which Two Persons Exist in One Animal 253
Mark D. Reid
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vi c ontents
Index 329
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/25/2016, SPi
List of Contributors
1
Introduction
Stephan Blatti and Paul F. Snowdon
The purpose of this collection is to gather together a group of chapters that are inspired
by three central questions: What is animalism? What implications does it have? Is
animalism true? The aim is to push the debate about these questions forward. Most of
the chapters are new. The two that are not—those by Parfit and by Campbell and
McMahan—are recent and highly important essays that raise fundamental questions
about animalism, and we feel they deserve a place in this collection. We also wanted to
collect together good work from different intellectual centres around the world, in
North America, the UK, and Australasia, but also work from philosophers of different
ages and at different stages. Some chapters represent forceful and novel presentations
of relatively well-known viewpoints, whereas others move the debate along totally new
directions. No view is dominant, and different chapters focus on different aspects of
the debate. We, the editors, are both animalists (which is not to say that we are animal-
ists of precisely the same kind), but our main hope with this collection is that it will
stimulate new discussion, not that we shall make converts to our own view. It takes
time for debates in philosophy to deepen and to sort the wheat from the chaff, but
we hope this collection will help those things to happen in the next stage of debate
about animalism.
In this introduction we shall sketch the background to the current debates and try to
relate the chapters here to that background. It is impossible for us to pick out every
issue or argument in all the chapters that we regard as important. All we can do is to
highlight some of them. As with all philosophical subjects, properly sorting out the
issues is a task for those who wish to think about them.
One way to think of animalism is as a view about the relation between us, persons,
and animals. According to it we are identical with some animals. We can, then, regard
the background question as—what is our relation to animals? It is interesting to note
that this general question has risen to prominence not only in the analytic philosoph-
ical tradition, but also in the continental tradition (e.g. in the work of Derrida) and in
various areas of interdisciplinary inquiry (e.g. animal studies). The issues discussed
here, then, provide one example of intellectual convergence between multiple philo-
sophical traditions and areas of investigation.
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1.1. ‘Animalism’
As is the wont with -ism’s in philosophy, not everyone will define ‘animalism’ in the
same way. But a way that seems true to its use by many people is that it stands for the
claim that we, each of us, are identical to, are one and the same thing as, an animal of a
certain kind. That kind is what is called Homo sapiens. Putting it less technically, each
of us is a human animal. According to this proposal we can say that at various places
there is both an animal and one of us, and those things are in fact the same thing.
Now, it is often convenient to have a noun picking out those things that we have so
far picked out as ‘us’, or as ‘one of us’. We shall talk of the ‘person’ and of ‘persons’. In
using this venerable noun we are not committing ourselves to our usage being the
same as that of the normal usage. But using this noun, so interpreted, we can formulate
the claim as ‘each person is an animal’.
Formulating it in these ways leaves plenty of important interpretative questions
unexplored, to which we shall return, but it suffices to fix the central thesis. And putt-
ing the thesis this way renders it an answer to the question ‘What are we?’ or ‘What is
our nature?’ These questions are ones that have perennially gripped us, and to which
many intellectual traditions have given their answers.
introduction 3
two main alternative ways to think about our persistence, they were enriched and
complicated by two further developments. The first was the extraordinary popularity
within American and Australian philosophy, and subsequently in British philosophy,
of thinking about what is called identity over time within a framework of four-
dimensionalism. David Lewis’s work had a major influence in moving the debate in
that direction, of course. This meant that new ways to formulate the basic ideas were
inserted into the debate, and some new and fairly technical issues emerged. The second
new direction resulted from the very important work of Parfit who took what was
basically a sophisticated Lockean approach and tried to derive from it some radical
claims in value theory about the importance of facts about personal identity, captured,
no doubt rather crudely, in the slogan that ‘identity is not what matters’. Parfit’s ideas
about value and his linking of the personal identity debate to value theory generated a
rich discussion, and this linkage remains present in more recent debates, and indeed in
some contributions to this volume.
There is an important question that can be raised here, on the assumption that the
foregoing is more or less correct: Why was the idea of an animal conspicuously absent
in this classical period of debate? To answer this question we need to return to Locke’s
famous discussion of personal identity, in which the notion of an animal was central.1
One of Locke’s purposes was to affirm that the person—one example, as we might say,
being Locke himself—is not the animal but has persistence conditions which are quite
different, and is therefore a different item. Locke exercised great care in specifying the
different ideas for which the words ‘animal’ and ‘person’ stood. A reasonable conjec-
ture, or proposal, we suggest, is that Locke’s treatment of these two terms and notions
was so effective that it generated in people engaging with the problem the conviction
that the notion of a person is the central one fixing the type of thing the problem is
about, with the consequence that the notion of an animal was lost to sight. The cen-
trality of the notion of person represented what we might call a basic framework
assumption in the very formulation of the problem.2
Whatever the truth in that hypothesis, it is surely hard to escape the conviction that,
despite the richness of these debates, the invisibility in them of the notion of an animal
represented a gross impoverishment and oversight. This conviction struck a number
of philosophers, whose styles and metaphysical inclinations were otherwise quite
diverse, more or less simultaneously and independently in the 1980s (or perhaps
earlier). Among the philosophers who endorsed this conviction were David Wiggins,
Michael Ayers, Paul Snowdon, and Eric Olson in the UK, and Bill Carter and Peter van
1
See Locke 1975, II.xxviii.3, 5–8, 12–15, 21, 29. In these sections Locke regularly alludes to animals and
humans in his efforts to settle the nature of personal identity. Currently the interpretation of Locke’s dis-
cussion is a matter of considerable controversy, but Locke’s role in relegating the notion of animal can be
acknowledged whichever side one is on in this debate.
2
The invisibility of the notion of ‘animal’ in what we are calling the classical period was not of course
total. In influential discussions by both Shoemaker and Johnston, the notion does surface. What is striking
is how rare this engagement is, and, moreover, how—even when the notion of an animal attracted
attention—the assumption was that, of course, the animal is not what we are.
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Inwagen in the USA. Although this is not true of all those listed in the previous sen-
tence, the emergence into the debate of the notion of an animal was tied to three basic
convictions: first, that where each of us is, there is an animal, a thing belonging to a
kind that represents one of our most fundamental categories we operate with; second,
that given what seem to be the properties that the animal in question has (in particular,
its psychological properties), there is something close to a paradox in denying the iden-
tity between the animal and the person, and hence there is something close to a para-
dox in the major views that the dominant tradition was exploring; third, in the light of
the force of that type of consideration, we should search very hard for ways to counter
the arguments that philosophers provide for denying the identity, since those argu-
ments give the appearance of leading us astray. The initial and shared reason for
thinking that there is something close to a paradox in the denial of the identity acquired
the name of the ‘two lives objection’.3
These developments in philosophy were driven primarily by responses within that
discipline to the arguments that were taken to be powerful by its practitioners, but
other disciplines provided what we might call ‘aid and comfort’ for the new ideas.
Criticisms of what came to be called ‘anthropodenial’ (i.e. the denial that we are ani-
mals) in the writings of such ethologists as Frans de Waal strongly supported
animalism.
Once this animalist approach came to the notice of philosophers more generally,
and the idea of an animal ceased to be so invisible to philosophers, the debate became
much richer, in a way that was dictated by the basic structure of the early animalist
writings. One area of debate was the attempt by anti-animalists to discredit the
so-called two lives objection.4 Another area of debate has been the development of
anti-animalist arguments that did not surface in the initial period of discussion.5
However, on the pro-animalist side of the debate, new arguments are emerging and
new difficulties in the opposition views are being constructed.6 We shall spell some of
these out in more detail in Section 1.3. The work in the present volume bears testimony
to these critical and constructive developments.
3
For early expressions of this line of thought see Carter 1989, Snowdon 1990, Ayers 1991.
4
See Noonan 1998, Baker 2000, Shoemaker 1999.
5
See, e.g., Baker 2000, McMahan 2002, Johnston 2007.
6
See Blatti 2012, Snowdon 2014.
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introduction 5
property which one entity has but the other lacks. If that can be found, then however
closely they are related, they are not identical. Now, if we simply compare in a superfi-
cial way ourselves with the animals located where we are, what is striking is how much
overlap there is in our properties. We would say that the two things have the same
physical properties (e.g. we weigh the same, look the same, etc.), and we share the same
biological features (e.g. the two of us are alive, digest food, breathe, reproduce, and so
on).7 So, how might someone argue that there is property difference? One cannot argue
that the animal is an animal, but that we are persons, since any animalist will agree with
that but claim that what follows is that there is an animal which is a person, and there is
no obvious reason to object to that as a possibility.
What supposed differences do philosophers think they have located which support
the denial of this identity? One traditional reason for rejecting this identity emerged in
the writings of Descartes. He combined the claim that we rational creatures are
non-physical selves, or egos, with the further claim that animals are purely physical
systems running according to physical-mechanical laws. The conjunction of these
claims implied that we things which are selves are not the self-same things as animals.
However, in the tradition of debate that the chapters in this volume are situated, this
Cartesian conception of an alleged difference in properties has not really had any ser-
ious influence. Further, part of Descartes’ reasons for thinking that we are non-physical
egos is that he believed that a purely physical system is very limited in what it can do,
whereas we are capable of an almost unlimited range of achievements due to our
rationality. This supposed contrast in capacities, however, is doubly unjustified. First,
Descartes really has no good reason to think that he knows what powers purely mater-
ial things can possess. Either he should have held that he was ignorant of the powers of
material things, or, maybe, he should even have inclined to the idea that some matter
has very advanced capacities. This latter idea would have amounted, so to speak, to an
early discovery of that amazing physical thing, the central nervous system. Second,
Descartes had no grounds for supposing he knew what our cognitive powers are.
Maybe they are much more limited than he knew. The anti-animalists in this volume
are not really inspired by such Cartesian reasons.8
The supposed property differences between us and the human animal occupying
the same space that have seemed to occur to most philosophers are differences in what
should be counted as happening to us and to the linked human animal in certain
7
To anyone who has spent any time on safari, what is most obvious is how the activities and processes
that fill the lives of the animals observed there are ones that fill our time too, such activities as cleaning
oneself and others, feeding, drinking and excreting, resting, searching for food, etc. These similarities
between us and them are what is most striking, though the precise way we, for example, acquire food is
different to the way they acquire it. Of course it is also striking that we devote time to things they do not
engage in—like writing philosophy, making clothes, and putting up buildings!
8
Although writers in the present volume do not belong to the Cartesian tradition, there is in current
philosophy an approach to the problem of personal identity, known as the Simple View, which, in many of
its expositions, resembles the Cartesian approach in its conclusions and its style of argument. Presentations
and criticisms of this approach can be found in Gasser and Stefan 2012.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/25/2016, SPi
introduction 7
no good basis to trust our relatively immediate reactions to the description of cases
when tracing the fate of the persons involved, but that there are relatively well-
established metaphysical principles that support the verdict about the survival of the
person upon which the brain transplant argument rests. In contrast, in chapter 9 Rory
Madden expresses scepticism about this proposal. It needs pointing out, also, that such
transplant arguments rely on our being accurate about what happens to the animal.
Are we entitled to be confident about that?
Although drawing the contrast between animalism as an identity thesis and animal-
ism as a thesis about personal identity is important because it makes the central thesis
more precise, doing so also encourages us to think about the basic thesis in broader
ways. Thus, if each of us is a human animal and we count ourselves as subjects of
experience, it is implied that a human animal is a subject of experience. The question
then is: Are there conditions on being single subjects of experience that human ani-
mals might fail to satisfy? This is the question that Snowdon engages with in Chapter 13,
especially in relation to the idea of the unity of experience, and perhaps cognition, that
single subjects must enjoy.
We have argued in this section that animalism per se is not a theory of personal
identity, but also that it has a generality that certainly makes it a much broader proposal
than being merely a theory of personal identity.
9
See Johnston 1987.
10
The philosopher mentioned earlier as an early animalist who did not see things this way is Wiggins.
For him the notion of an animal can be discerned in the best analysis of the notion of a person. His view
seemed to be that it is obvious that we are persons, and that philosophy can reveal that the proper analysis
of ‘person’ builds the notion around that of a type of animal. Most animalists, by contrast, do not regard the
identity as defensible by that sort of reasoning.
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introduction 9
for putting the thesis this way. But, further, there is no obvious noun that picks out the
group we wish to talk about. It might seem that the animalist identity could be
expressed by saying that (all) persons are animals. But there is no reason to suppose
that this picks out the right group. One problem is that—at least according to one
standard use of ‘person’ encapsulated in Locke’s famous definition that a person is a
being with reason and reflection that can consider itself the same thinking self in dif-
ferent times and places—there is no ground for supposing there could not be persons
who are not animals (say, gods, angels, pixies, etc.). On the other hand, if we are inter-
ested in what we are, there is no reason to exclude from the extension of ‘we’ creatures
like us who lack the psychological faculties that Locke deems necessary for person-
hood. Of course, there may be other nouns that could be used than ‘person’, but there
seem to be problems with these alternatives as well.
If it is thought that we have a reason to employ the first-person plural pronoun in
stating the identity, then a question needs posing and facing. The problem arises
because pronouns like ‘we’ and ‘us’ do not have strict rules governing their reference. If
a speaker uses the word ‘we’ to pick out a group, it seems that it must include the
speaker, but who else it includes is left open simply given the use of ‘we’. So, a philo-
sophical identity thesis employing the word ‘we’ or ‘us’ raises the question: Which
group is meant by ‘we’? Our aim here is not to answer that question, but rather simply
to highlight it as one that ultimately needs a proper treatment within this debate.
The third issue we want to highlight is that our formulation of animalism as an iden-
tity thesis has made no commitment to the claim, which animalists typically endorse,
that, as we might put it, if something is an animal, then it is essentially and fundamen-
tally an animal.11 This way of speaking is surely familiar, even if it is hard to explain in a
much fuller way if it is challenged. Another way of putting it is that ‘animal’ is a
high-level sortal term. Let us call this the ‘animal as sortal’ thesis.
It is clear that the basic identity thesis does not entail the ‘animal as sortal’ thesis. It is
quite obvious that there is no reverse entailment, since many deniers of the identity
assume that the ‘animal as sortal’ thesis is true. Locke seems to have been a prime
example. It needs, then, to be recognized that it is possible to hold the identity thesis
with or without the ‘animal as sortal’ thesis.
That leaves two important questions to be faced. The first is whether the sortal thesis
is true or not. The second is whether the position that affirms the identity without
affirming the sortal thesis is interesting and important or not. We are not proposing to
answer those questions here, but simply to point them out as ones that hang over the
debate about animalism. Chapter 5 by Mark Johnston engages with this problem.
The fourth area to which we would like to draw attention is the relation between
animalism and value theory. Although the question ‘What are we?’ (and the proposed
answers to that question, for example, that we are animals) are not directly about value,
it is natural to see links between them. There are various examples of philosophers
11
For an endorsement of this claim see Snowdon 1990, Olson 1997.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/25/2016, SPi
proposing links here. For example, Locke’s original discussion of personal identity
stresses that ‘person’ is a forensic term, that is, a notion the application of which has
implications about responsibility. His arguments frequently appeal to intuitions about
responsibility and about concern.12 More recently Parfit has defended the radical
idea that ‘identity does not matter’ on the basis of an argument resting on aspects of
a theory of personal identity. In his case, the assumed account of our persistence
conditions is neo-Lockeanism. Further, in some discussions of animalism, when
defending it against some objections, appeal has been made to such ideas.13 So, one
general theme, currently somewhat limited, in the literature about animalism has been
its links to values (in the broadest sense). Several of the chapters in Part III address
themselves to these links.
What are the issues here more generally? One general question is whether there are
arguments from claims about value which count against animalism, or such arguments
which count for animalism. An example of a line of thought against animalism, deriving
from Locke’s approach is based on two claims: first, if person x is the same person as y,
then x is responsible for everything that y did; and second, to be responsible for an
action, a person must be mentally linked to the action, say, by way of remembering it. If
both these claims are true, then animalism is in trouble. But in reply it is perfectly rea-
sonable to deny both claims. A person is not necessarily responsible for what he or she
did, and there is no rigid prohibition on someone counting as responsible for an action
that is not remembered. A further general issue is whether the animalist thesis might
clarify our thinking about value. If animalism is correct does that undermine the argu-
ments that Parfit advances to support his claims about value? Or does the idea that we
have an animal nature help us to identify what is of value in our lives? These are ques-
tions that need investigation. In this volume Chapter 14 by Jens Johansson provides an
illuminating and original discussion of some of these issues.
Although it is not our aim to make converts to animalism, nor to argue for the pos-
ition here, there are some features of the position that seem to us to warrant not simply
abandoning it in the face of a few typical philosophical objections. That is to say, we
should test such objections thoroughly. Here are four reasons for regarding it this way.
First, once one rejects animalism it becomes difficult to propose an account of our
nature and persistence conditions that will be complete and intelligible, and which
has any chance of generating agreement. Even if neo-Lockeans have satisfactorily
answered the standard objections to their view, they seem to have no route to filling in
the details of the required psychological links that will look plausible. Those who
favour a view based on the notion of the continuance of neural structures enabling
consciousness either are tempted to identify us with those inner neural structures,
in which we have a self-conception that is more or less incredible, or they identify us in
normal times with the larger surrounding entity, but they still face the task of specifying
12
For one development of the idea that such value concerns are central to Locke, see Strawson 2011.
13
See Olson 1997, ch. 3.
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introduction 11
what neural bundles are necessary and sufficient for persistence, which it is hard to
believe can be done in a way that generates agreement. It may be that we have to go in
such directions but there is considerable attraction in trying to avoid that. Second,
animalism has the singular advantage of being the view that many scientifically know-
ledgeable people assume and work within. It should give philosophers some pause
when they deny what many people take as more or less obvious.14 Third, although
philosophers have concentrated on analysing the conditions for us remaining in exist-
ence over time, we should also aim to achieve some understanding of our spatial extent
at a time. Why are these limbs and organs part of me, but, say, my clothes are not? Most
so-called theories of personal identity shed no light on this question. We have, though,
a well-grounded and clear grasp of the extent at a time of animals. Animalism prom-
ises to explain (or illuminate) both our persistence conditions and our spatial extent.
Fourth, animalism seems to make available to us explanations of many of our basic
features. Thus, if we are animals we can explain why the world contains us in terms of
ordinary evolutionary theory. And, we assume, we can explain why we have special
concerns about our own futures, and why we are drawn to sex, and eating, and so on, in
terms of our nature as animals. There is an explanatory simplicity built into the view.
These points do not force us to accept animalism, but they surely give some support
to being reluctant to give up such a view without a real fight. Anyway, the chapters that
follow need to be carefully weighed, if these attractions are real.
1.6. Contents
We now wish to highlight some of the issues raised by the contributors, and point to
some questions that need asking in light of them. Our approach has to be very select-
ive, and we cannot pick out everything that is of significance.
We have arranged the chapters into three broad groups: those that are principally
concerned with criticizing animalism (Part I), those that are principally concerned with
defending animalism (Part II), and those that are principally concerned with exploring
animalism’s practical applications (Part III). Of course, this is not the only way the chap-
ters might have been arranged, and even by the classifications we adopted, individual
chapters might have been grouped differently. (Chapter 11 by Campbell and McMahan,
for example, is both critical of animalism and an exploration of animalism’s implica-
tions.) In any case, the reader should follow her interests in determining the sequence in
which she moves through the volume; the chapters certainly need not be read in the
order in which we have arranged them. A second purpose of this section of our intro-
duction, then, can be seen as guiding the reader’s determination on how to proceed.
14
For a characteristic affirmation of animalism by a scientist, here is the opening of psychologist
Thomas Suddendorf ’s recent book (2013: 1): ‘Biology puts beyond doubt that you are an organism. Like all
living organisms, humans metabolize and reproduce. Your genome uses the same dictionary as a tulip and
overlaps considerably with the genetic makeup of yeast, bananas, and mice. You are an animal.’
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Part I
In Chapter 2, Derek Parfit provides an important contribution in presenting his cur-
rent thinking on animalism, Lockeanism, and the fundamental nature of human per-
sons. Parfit observes that the whole human animal thinks only derivatively, i.e. only in
virtue of having a proper part that is directly engaged in thinking. The part of the ani-
mal that thinks nonderivatively is not the head, since the head thinks only in virtue of
having a thinking brain as a part. Nor is the animal’s brain a nonderivative thinker,
since it thinks only in virtue of including a thinking cerebrum. And while Parfit never
tells us precisely what thing it is that thinks nonderivatively, ultimately there must be
a smallest proper part of a human animal that does so: the cerebrum itself maybe, or
perhaps some still smaller part. And whatever brain part it is that nonderivatively
satisfies Locke’s definition of a person (‘a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason
and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different
times and places’), this thing, Parfit says, is what we are. He calls this the ‘embodied
person view’ because this proper part of your animal is a person and this embodied
person is you.
Parfit’s extended argument for this position consists in demonstrating its utility. For
example, this view preserves our intuition about transplant cases: when the part of
your brain that thinks nonderivatively is removed from one animal body and
implanted into another animal body, you (i.e. the person you are) are thus relocated.
The embodied person view can also answer various challenges that the animalist has
put to the Lockean. For example, the too many thinkers objection makes the point that
the Lockean distinction between persons and animals carries the absurd implication
that every thought is had by two thinkers: the person and the animal. But the Lockean
who affirms the embodied person view has the resources to avoid this problem: unlike
the person who thinks nonderivatively, the animal thinks only by having a part that
does. Furthermore, Parfit presents his view as ‘an obvious solution’ to the thinking
parts objection to animalism. For each human animal, there is only one thing—one
small part of the animal’s brain—that is nonderivatively a Lockean person. To the
extent that proper parts of the animal are thinking parts, they are not thinkers in the
most important sense. As a result, you can know that you are not an animal because
you are whatever thing it is that thinks nonderivatively, and that thing—that person—
is not an animal.
Parfit’s embodied person view is innovative and represents an important contribu-
tion both to the debate over personal identity generally and to the discussion of ani-
malism specifically. Indeed, it is for this reason that we wanted to include this essay in
the volume, despite its having appeared in print previously. Nevertheless, the
embodied person view relies on some distinctions that will require further scrutiny.
One such distinction is the derivative–nonderivative distinction itself. It is unclear, for
instance, precisely what conditions a thing must satisfy in order to qualify as being
directly involved in thinking. In the absence of this precissification, animalists may
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introduction 13
suspect that any plausible candidate for being a nonderivative thinker will include as a
proper part something that is not directly involved in thinking. The embodied person
view also relies on a distinction between two usages of the first-person pronoun. In
defending his view against an important objection, Parfit distinguishes the ‘Inner-I’
used to refer to the Lockean person and the ‘Outer-I’ used to refer to the human ani-
mal. Parfit is certainly not the first Lockean to draw this distinction; Baker (2000, 2007),
Noonan (1998, 2001), Strawson (2009), and others have done so as well. But nor is it a
distinction that has escaped controversy.15
In Chapter 3, Lynne Rudder Baker usefully and carefully presents her distinctive
and well-known view of the relation between persons and animals, which is anti-
animalist, and which holds that, in standard conditions, the animal constitutes, but is
not identical with, the person. She sketches her distinctive elucidation of the constitu-
tion relation and its links with predication and truth conditions. She then employs
these ideas to try to rebut the core pro-animalist arguments, and finally she adds two
new reasons to favour her approach. Her response to the pro-animalist arguments
raises the question why we should operate with the logic that she sketches. This is a
question that has already received considerable attention, and the conduct of that
debate will benefit from her clear and concise presentation. With her novel anti-ani-
malist arguments one rests on the conviction that it is possible to preserve a person
while totally replacing the constituting organic matter by inorganic matter, hence
removing the animal while preserving the person, and one crucial question is why we
should concede that is possible. This question has, at least, two sides. Can we be confi-
dent that a non-organic construct can sustain mentality? The other issue is whether we
are entitled to be confident that if such an entity is possible it should count as being the
person. The other argument rests on the conviction that persons will survive bodily
death, a central religious conviction in the Christian tradition, but not something all of
us are inclined to think. The argument also relies on the principle that if something is
in fact to exist eternally it must be incorruptible. It might seem to those on the outside
of the religious debate that God’s supposed omnipotence might unlock this problem.
However, this interesting argument illustrates the way in which debate about animal-
ism can be, and has been, broadened by its links to theological considerations.
In Chapter 4, Denis Robinson’s ambitious aim is to persuade us that what he calls
psychological views of our fundamental nature fit well within what we might call a
plausible metaphysics of the natural world. In particular, Robinson aims to counter the
claim, promoted by Ayers and Olson, that it is a difficulty for non-animalist accounts if
they employ the notion of constitution. He starts by engaging with the thought that
animalism is more commonsensical than the psychological alternative. Robinson
holds that the psychological view implies that entities of different types can coincide,
but he suggests that this possibility is one that is not repugnant to common sense, since
15
For discussion, see Noonan 2012 and Olson 2002, 2007: 37–9.
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introduction 15
introduction 17
same mental properties, and since the psychological animal and the biological animal
have the same physical properties, they will have the same mental life. Shoemaker’s
response, therefore, is to devise a metaphysics of properties that gives an interpretation
of physicalism which blocks this derivation.
Shoemaker’s account is centred on the distinction between thick and thin proper-
ties. Thin properties (e.g. shape) can be shared by entities of different kinds, whereas
thick properties (e.g. mental properties) can be shared only by entities of the same
kind. Shoemaker takes properties to be individuated by causal profiles. He distin-
guishes between causal roles that are defined in terms of effects generated in the entity
itself and those that are not defined that way. A possible illustration of this distinction,
not given by Shoemaker, is that being radioactive is not defined particularly in terms of
effects on the entity itself, whereas being angry is, perhaps, defined in terms of con-
tinuing processes within the thing possessing the property. A further aspect of this
distinction put forward in Section 6.3 is that a thick property ‘partly determines the
possessor’s persistence conditions’. Shoemaker claims that mental properties are thin
in this sense. Then, in Section 6.4, the notion of realization is clarified so that just
because an entity possesses the properties which fix that there is a mental property
present does not mean that that thing has the mental property. With these clarifica-
tions in place, Shoemaker proposes that he has avoided ascribing mental properties to
biological animals. Further, in Sections 6.5 through 6.7, he employs the machinery
that he has set up to explain the embodiment of psychological subjects, and also to
explain and defend talk of bodies and corpses.
The metaphysics that Shoemaker constructs around the concepts described above
defies any brief summary and also any brief assessment. The challenge for a reader is to
test the approach out as thoroughly as possible.
Part II
Olson devotes Chapter 7 to analysing a key objection to animalism and to assessing the
prospects for a satisfactory animalist response to that objection. The objection he con-
siders—the ‘remnant persons objection’, first developed by Mark Johnston (2007:
45)—is a twist on the more familiar transplant objection. In this case, instead of
imagining your cerebrum being installed in the cerebrum-less skull of another human
animal, Johnston invites us to consider your cerebrum mid-transplant: removed from
your skull, but artificially sustained—in the fabled vat, say. This organ, we can assume,
is not only capable of thought in general, but is psychologically just like you. Johnston
calls it a ‘remnant person’. Animalism, of course, is committed to denying that this
remnant person is you, since a cerebrum is not an animal. The official animalist line
has it that you are the cerebrum-less organism left behind.
But even beyond this counter-intuitive commitment, animalists face the further
challenge of explaining the origin of a remnant person: When does it come into
existence? As Olson notes, the person does not exist before the operation, since this
would mean that there must have been two persons prior to the procedure: ‘you, who
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according to animalism became a brainless vegetable, and the remnant person, who
became a naked brain’. And yet the alternative answer—that the person came into
existence when your cerebrum was removed from your skull—looks to be equally
problematic. First of all, it seems absurd to think that a person could be created simply
by cutting away sustaining human tissue. A further problem emerges once we imagine
what the animalist must say about the fate of remnant people in transplant operations.
When your cerebrum is installed in my body, I do not become you, the remnant
person. According to animalism, I am the same organism that previously lacked a
cerebrum; I was never a cerebrum in a vat. But this suggests that, by animalism’s lights,
the result of the transplant is the destruction of the remnant person. Consequently,
neither answer to the origin question appears to be open to the animalist. Claiming
that the person existed prior to the cerebrum’s removal commits the animalist to
affirming the existence of multiple persons for each human animal, while claiming
that the person came into existence when the cerebrum was removed commits the
animalist to the two absurdities just described.
Olson devotes the remainder of his chapter to exploring several possible strategies
whereby an animalist can avoid these absurdities while still accounting for the ‘sort of
thing the remnant person would be, where she could come from, what would happen
to her at the end of the operation and why, and how she would relate to you and me’.
He rules out the possibility that the remnant person could be you after considering
three ways that an animalist might defend this claim—‘accidentalism’, ‘scattered ani-
malism’, and Madden’s (2011) ‘remote-thought hypothesis’—and finding all of them
unconvincing. And Olson’s objections to the proposal that the remnant person could
be your cerebrum—what he calls ‘remnant cerebralism’—are equally withering. The
last strategy that Olson explores appeals to van Inwagen’s (1990) answer to the special
composition question in denying the existence of a remnant person. Olson calls this
proposal—‘brain eliminativism’—‘drastic’, but offers no further criticism, and one
has the sense that, of the various strategies open to the animalist, this is the one that
Olson regards as the least unpromising, as it were.
Nevertheless, Olson concedes that he can see no really satisfying animalist solution
to the remnant-person problem, but that this constitutes reason to reject animalism
‘only if our being animals is the source of the problem’. And in the final section of the
chapter, Olson argues that this is not the case, i.e. that the remnant persons problem
represents a challenge to animalism no more than it does to nearly all of animalism’s
main rivals. The one exception, Olson recognizes, is the brain view, according to which
we are our brains (or, perhaps, our cerebrums).
In Chapter 8, Stephan Blatti focuses on what might be called the standard objection
to the standard argument. The standard argument for animalism—the ‘thinking animal
argument’—was developed and refined over the years by Ayers, Carter, McDowell,
Snowdon, and Olson. This argument registers the implausible multiplication of thinkers
to which anyone who denies animalism’s identity thesis is thereby committed.
According to one formulation of the standard argument, since animals think, and since
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introduction 19
you think, if the identity thesis is false, then there must be two qualitatively identical
mental lives running in parallel: yours and that of the animal located where you are. But
since this is absurd, we should accept the identity thesis. The standard objection to this
argument—one that animalism’s supporters and critics alike regard as posing a formid-
able challenge—points out that an analogous line of reasoning seems to recommend the
opposite conclusion. Since thinking is plausibly attributed to many of an animal’s
proper parts—e.g. its undetached head, its brain—what entitles the animalist to sup-
pose that each of us is the whole thinking animal rather than any one of the animal’s
many thinking parts? This sceptical question reflects the ‘thinking parts problem’.
Blatti’s aim is not to solve this problem, but to outline several strategies that animal-
ists might pursue further in attempting to escape the thinking parts problem without
renouncing the thinking animal argument. According to one of these strategies, the
animalist answers the sceptical question directly by appealing to Tim Williamson’s
(2000) recent attack on the ‘phenomenal conception of evidence’ and its role in scepti-
cal scenarios like the one envisioned by the thinking parts problem. According to this
conception, a subject’s phenomenal state just is her evidentiary state. But, Blatti sug-
gests, if Williamson is correct that this conception is false because knowledge is factive,
then the sort of evidence to which we would ordinarily appeal in ascribing thinking to
the whole animal (e.g. the fact that the sensory, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic experi-
ences that your proper, thinking parts have are detected in parts of the whole animal
that are not parts of themselves) does in fact ground our claim to know—indeed, con-
sists in our knowledge—that each of us is the whole thinking animal rather than any of
its thinking parts.
The second main strategy that Blatti explores involves short-circuiting the thinking
parts problem by challenging the attribution of thinking to proper parts in the first
place. Here he distinguishes Wittgensteinian from non-Wittgensteinian resistance to
such ascriptions. For the Wittgensteinian, to ascribe psychological activities to a proper
part is to subsume under the concept human animal something that does not fall under
that concept. Thinking cannot intelligibly be attributed proper parts like heads and
brains, on this view, because the criteria for the ascription of thinking lie in the behav-
iour of a whole animal, and proper parts do not behave. The non-Wittgensteinian diag-
nosis that Blatti sketches reaches the same conclusion by a different route. Rather than
pointing to conceptual confusion as the culprit, he urges us to reflect on the contexts in
which attributions of thinking are ordinarily made: not in isolation, let alone in the
course of philosophical argument, but embedded in practices of agential understanding
and moral concern. In other words, it is in our attempts to describe, explain, praise, and
blame one another’s actions that we credit ourselves with various cognitive and affective
capacities. This, Blatti suggests, is the reason why animalism’s critic is mistaken in attrib-
uting thinking to a human animal’s parts: because the only behaviour eligible for agen-
tial understanding and moral concern is the behaviour of the whole animal.
The aim of Blatti’s paper is not to pursue any one of these strategies as far as they go,
but to provide a roadmap for other animalists to do so. Nevertheless, it must be
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/25/2016, SPi
admitted that, for all of the strategies Blatti sketches, the devil lurks in the details, and
some of those details—such as Williamson’s conception of knowledge as evidence and
Wittgenstein’s account of conceptual criteria—are highly contentious indeed.
In Chapter 9, Rory Madden’s very rich contribution starts from a recently devised
problem for what he calls the naïve thesis, which is the idea that we are things which
have a human shape, and that the things within that shape are our parts. This is sum-
marized in the words that we are humanoids. As he points out, this thesis is not the
same as animalism, since it is possible to hold that we are constituted by the animal
where we are, even though we are not identical to that animal, but we would then share
the animal’s shape. Clearly, though, animalists are committed to the naïve thesis. The
problem in its initial formulation is epistemological. It relies on a number of assump-
tions and so takes some time to formulate properly, even in summary form.
It starts from the naturalistically inspired thesis that the parts of us that are respon-
sible for generating consciousness and thought are just a small part of us. Most of us
would say that these parts, which Madden calls our T-parts, are more or less the same
as the brain. To this can be added the idea that just as our T-parts are what enable us to
have a viewpoint, our T-parts are also parts of other entities, whose existence we seem
to recognize. Thus my T-part is also part of my head, and of my upper body, etc. Now, it
would seem that if I have a viewpoint in virtue of the processes in the T-parts that I
contain, then anybody who contains those same T-parts thereby also acquires a view-
point, indeed the same viewpoint. So this means that my head has a point of view, as
does my upper body, as does anything that overlaps with my T-parts. If that is right,
then our knowledge that we are humanoids is threatened. The reason is, roughly, that it
is not implausible to say that it is a condition on a ground for a belief to count as
knowledge-generating that it will not generate errors in most subjects who form beliefs
on its basis. However, most of my overlappers will form the false belief that they are
humanoid on the basis of the experiences which lead me to think I am humanoid. Given
this epistemological principle, it would seem to follow that I do not know that I am
humanoid. In which case it also seems to follow that I do not know that I am an animal.
Madden remarks that he agrees with Olson in thinking that this is a far more trouble-
some problem for animalism than the familiar traditional anti-animalist arguments.
In Madden’s engagement with this argument a rich and very interesting range of
responses are developed and explored. What stands out is that the argument relies on a
fair number of diverse assumptions, allowing a wide range of potential replies. One
response he mentions is what he calls ‘eliminativism’, the view that there are no such
things as undetached parts of us. If there are no overlappers then the problem vanishes.
Some philosophers affirm this negative ontological claim. Madden’s response is not to
affirm categorically the existence of overlappers, but to suggest, surely plausibly, that it
is hard to feel confident that there are no such things as my head or my hands or my
fingers. Indeed, such a response is almost as paradoxical as the original sceptical con-
clusion. We are to save the idea that we know we are humanoid by being sceptical that
there are such things as heads, knees, and toes.
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the lower is simply that the higher beliefs, being a creation of
superior intelligence, have little hold on the minds of the vulgar, who
nominally profess them for a time in conformity with the will of their
betters, but readily shed and forget them as soon as these beliefs
have gone out of fashion with the educated classes. But while they
dismiss without a pang or an effort articles of faith which were only
superficially imprinted on their minds by the weight of cultured
opinion, the ignorant and foolish multitude cling with a sullen
determination to far grosser beliefs which really answer to the
coarser texture of their undeveloped intellect. Thus while the avowed
creed of the enlightened minority is constantly changing under the
influence of reflection and enquiry, the real, though unavowed, creed
of the mass of mankind appears to be almost stationary, and the
reason why it alters so little is that in the majority of men, whether
they are savages or outwardly civilized beings, intellectual progress
is so slow as to be hardly perceptible. The surface of society, like
that of the sea, is in perpetual motion; its depths, like those of the
ocean, remain almost unmoved.
Thus from an examination, first, of savagery
The early history of and, second, of its survivals in civilization, the
mankind,
reconstructed from study of Social Anthropology attempts to trace the
the joint testimony early history of human thought and institutions.
of savagery and The history can never be complete, unless science
folklore, is full of
gaps, which can should discover some mode of reading the faded
only be imperfectly record of the past of which we in this generation
bridged by the
Comparative
can hardly dream. We know indeed that every
Method. event, however insignificant, implies a change,
however slight, in the material constitution of the
universe, so that the whole history of the world is, in a sense,
engraved upon its face, though our eyes are too dim to read the
scroll. It may be that in the future some wondrous reagent, some
magic chemical, may yet be found to bring out the whole of nature’s
secret handwriting for a greater than Daniel to interpret to his fellows.
That will hardly be in our time. With the resources at present at our
command we must be content with a very brief, imperfect, and in
large measure conjectural account of man’s mental and social
development in prehistoric ages. As I have already pointed out, the
evidence, fragmentary and dubious as it is, only runs back a very
little way into the measureless past of human life on earth; we soon
lose the thread, the faintly glimmering thread, in the thick darkness of
the absolutely unknown. Even in the comparatively short space of
time, a few thousand years at most, which falls more or less within
our ken, there are many deep and wide chasms which can only be
bridged by hypotheses, if the story of evolution is to run continuously.
Such bridges are built in anthropology as in
The legitimacy of biology by the Comparative Method, which
the Comparative
Method in social enables us to borrow the links of one chain of
anthropology rests evidence to supply the gaps in another. For us
on the similarity of who deal, not with the various forms of animal life,
the human mind in
all races. but with the various products of human
intelligence, the legitimacy of the Comparative
Method rests on the well-ascertained similarity of the working of the
human mind in all races of men. I have laid stress on the great
inequalities which exist not only between the various races, but
between men of the same race and generation; but it should be
clearly understood and remembered that these divergencies are
quantitative rather than qualitative, they consist in differences of
degree rather than of kind. The savage is not a different sort of being
from his civilized brother: he has the same capacities, mental and
moral, but they are less fully developed: his evolution has been
arrested, or rather retarded, at a lower level. And as savage races
are not all on the same plane, but have stopped or tarried at different
points of the upward path, we can to a certain extent, by comparing
them with each other, construct a scale of social progression and
mark out roughly some of the stages on the long road that leads
from savagery to civilization. In the kingdom of mind such a scale of
mental evolution answers to the scale of morphological evolution in
the animal kingdom.
From what I have said I hope you have formed
It is only of late some idea of the extreme importance which the
years that the
importance of study of savage life possesses for a proper
savagery as a understanding of the early history of mankind. The
document of human savage is a human document, a record of man’s
history has been
understood. efforts to raise himself above the level of the
beast. It is only of late years that the full value of the document has
been appreciated; indeed, many people are probably still of Dr.
Johnson’s opinion, who, pointing to the three large volumes of
Voyages to the South Seas which had just come out, said: “Who will
read them through? A man had better work his way before the mast
than read them through; they will be eaten by rats and mice before
they are read through. There can be little entertainment in such
books; one set of savages is like another.”173.1 But the world has
learned a good deal since Dr. Johnson’s day; and the records of
savage life, which the sage of Bolt Court consigned without scruple
to the rats and mice, have now their place among the most precious
archives of humanity. Their fate has been like that of the Sibylline
Books. They were neglected and despised when they might have
been obtained complete; and now wise men would give more than a
king’s ransom for their miserably mutilated and imperfect remains. It
is true that before our time civilized men often viewed savages with
interest and described them intelligently, and some of their
descriptions are still of great scientific value. For
Great impulse given example, the discovery of America naturally
to the study of
savagery by the excited in the minds of the European peoples an
discovery of eager curiosity as to the inhabitants of the new
America and of the world, which had burst upon their gaze, as if at the
Pacific.
waving of a wizard’s wand the curtain of the
western sky had suddenly rolled up and disclosed scenes of glamour
and enchantment. Accordingly some of the Spaniards who explored
and conquered these realms of wonder have bequeathed to us
accounts of the manners and customs of the Indians, which for
accuracy and fulness of detail probably surpass any former records
of an alien race. Such, for instance, is the great work of the
Franciscan friar Sahagun on the natives of Mexico, and such the
work of Garcilasso de la Vega, himself half an Inca, on the Incas of
Peru. Again, the exploration of the Pacific in the eighteenth century,
with its revelation of fairy-like islands scattered in profusion over a
sea of eternal summer, drew the eyes and stirred the imagination of
Europe; and to the curiosity thus raised in many minds, though not in
Dr. Johnson’s, we owe some precious descriptions of the islanders,
who, in those days of sailing ships, appeared to dwell so remote
from us that the poet Cowper fancied their seas might never again
be ploughed by English keels.174.1
These and many other old accounts of savages
The passing of the must always retain their interest and value for the
savage.
study of Social Anthropology, all the more because
they set before us the natives in their natural unsophisticated state,
before their primitive manners and customs had been altered or
destroyed by European influence. Yet in the light of subsequent
research these early records are often seen to be very defective,
because the authors, unaware of the scientific importance of facts
which to the ordinary observer might appear trifling or disgusting,
have either passed over many things of the highest interest in total
silence or dismissed them with a brief and tantalizing allusion. It is
accordingly necessary to supplement the reports of former writers by
a minute and painstaking investigation of the living savages in order
to fill up, if possible, the many yawning gaps in our knowledge.
Unfortunately this cannot always be done, since many savages have
either been totally exterminated or so changed by contact with
Europeans that it is no longer possible to obtain trustworthy
information as to their old habits and traditions. But whenever the
ancient customs and beliefs of a primitive race have passed away
unrecorded, a document of human history has perished beyond
recall. Unhappily this destruction of the archives, as we may call it, is
going on apace. In some places, for example, in Tasmania, the
savage is already extinct; in others, as in Australia, he is dying. In
others again, for instance in Central and Southern Africa, where the
numbers and inborn vigour of the race shew little or no sign of
succumbing in the struggle for existence, the influence of traders,
officials, and missionaries is so rapidly disintegrating and effacing the
native customs, that with the passing of the older generation even
the memory of them will soon in many places be gone. It is therefore
a matter of the most urgent scientific importance to secure without
delay full and accurate reports of these perishing or changing
peoples, to take permanent copies, so to say, of these precious
monuments before they are destroyed. It is not yet too late. Much
may still be learned, for example, in West Australia, in New Guinea,
in Melanesia, in Central Africa, among the hill tribes of India and the
forest Indians of the Amazons. There is still time to send expeditions
to these regions, to subsidize men on the spot, who are conversant
with the languages and enjoy the confidence of the natives; for there
are such men who possess or can obtain the very knowledge we
require, yet who, unaware or careless of its inestimable value for
science, make no effort to preserve the treasure for posterity, and, if
we do not speedily come to the rescue, will suffer it to perish with
them. In the whole range of human knowledge at the present
moment there is no more pressing need than that of recording this
priceless evidence of man’s early history before it is too late. For
soon, very soon, the opportunities which we still enjoy will be gone
for ever. In another quarter of a century probably there will be little or
nothing of the old savage life left to record. The savage, such as we
may still see him, will then be as extinct as the dodo. The sands are
fast running out: the hour will soon strike: the record will be closed:
the book will be sealed. And how shall we of this
The duty of our generation look when we stand at the bar of
generation to
posterity. posterity arraigned on a charge of high treason to
our race, we who neglected to study our perishing
fellow-men, but who sent out costly expeditions to observe the stars
and to explore the barren ice-bound regions of the poles, as if the
polar ice would melt and the stars would cease to shine when we are
gone? Let us awake from our slumber, let us light our lamps, let us
gird up our loins. The Universities exist for the advancement of
knowledge. It is their duty to add this new province to the ancient
departments of learning which they cultivate so diligently.
Cambridge, to its honour, has led the way in equipping and
despatching anthropological expeditions; it is for Oxford, it is for
Liverpool, it is for every University in the land to join in the work.
More than that, it is the public duty of every
The duty of the civilized state actively to co-operate. In this
State.
respect the United States of America, by instituting
a bureau for the study of the aborigines within its dominions, has set
an example which every enlightened nation that rules over lower
races ought to imitate. On none does that duty,
The duty of that responsibility, lie more clearly and more
England.
heavily than on our own, for to none in the whole
course of human history has the sceptre been given over so many
and so diverse races of men. We have made ourselves our brother’s
keepers. Woe to us if we neglect our duty to our brother! It is not
enough for us to rule in justice the peoples we have subjugated by
the sword. We owe it to them, we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to
posterity, who will require it at our hands, that we should describe
them as they were before we found them, before they ever saw the
English flag and heard, for good or evil, the English tongue. The
voice of England speaks to her subject peoples in other accents than
in the thunder of her guns. Peace has its triumphs as well as war:
there are nobler trophies than captured flags and cannons. There
are monuments, airy monuments, monuments of
Monumentum aere words, which seem so fleeting and evanescent,
perennius.
that will yet last when your cannons have
crumbled and your flags have mouldered into dust. When the Roman
poet wished to present an image of perpetuity, he said that he would
be remembered so long as the Roman Empire endured, so long as
the white-robed procession of the Vestals and Pontiffs should
ascend the Capitol to pray in the temple of Jupiter. That solemn
procession has long ceased to climb the slope of the Capitol, the
Roman Empire itself has long passed away, like the empire of
Alexander, like the empire of Charlemagne, like the empire of Spain,
yet still amid the wreck of kingdoms the poet’s monument stands
firm, for still his verses are read and remembered. I appeal to the
Universities, I appeal to the Government of this country to unite in
building a monument, a beneficent monument, of the British Empire,
a monument
[The End]
INDEX
Aborigines of Australia, the severity with which they punish sexual
offences, 71 sqq.
Abraham and Sarah, 60 sq.
Abyssinia, 66, 81
Action and opinion, their relative values for society, 155
Adulterer and injured husband, physical relationship supposed to
exist between, 104 sq.
—— called a murderer, 65, 104
Adultery, expiation for, 44 sq.; disastrous effects supposed to flow
from, 44 sqq., 60 sq.; punishment of, 46, 50 sq., 63 sqq.;
supposed to be dangerous to the culprits, their spouses, and
their offspring, 102 sqq. See also Infidelity.
Africa, superstitious veneration for kings in, 12 sqq.; superstition as a
support of property in, 38 sqq.; disastrous effects supposed to
flow from sexual immorality in, 54 sqq.; British Central, 66, 79,
105; British East, 77, 81, 92, 105, 115, 123; German East, 92,
105, 106; North, 119
Akamba, the, of British East Africa, 77 sq., 105
Akikuyu, the, of British East Africa, 92, 105, 115, 128
Aleutian hunters, 106
Algonquin Indians, their modes of keeping off ghosts, 139
Amboyna, taboo in, 27 sq.
America, Indians of North, 130 sq.; the discovery of, 173
Amulets for the protection of fruit-trees, 29 sqq.
Analogy between the reproduction of men, animals, and plants, 99
sqq.
Ancestor-worship, 7
Anger of gods or spirits at sexual offences, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 54, 55
sq., 57, 61, 63, 107
Angola, 108; Cazembes of, 11
Angoni, the, of British Central Africa, 79, 132
Annam, savages of, 46
Annamites, the, 33
Anne, Queen, 18
Anointing the nail instead of the wound, 166
Antambahoaka, the, of Madagascar, 59
Anthropology, social, the scope of, 157 sqq.
Anyanja, the, of British Central Africa, 66, 79, 105
Arab merchant in Darfur, 39
Araucanians of Chili, 84
Arawaks of British Guiana, 83
Areopagus, trials for murder before the, 156
Argos, massacre at, 115
Aricara Indians, 118
Armenians, their mutilation of the dead, 133
Assam, tribes of, 45
Attic law as to homicides, 114
Atua, guardian spirit, 118
Atua tonga, divinity, 8
Aunt, incest with, 50, 51
Australia, aborigines of, the severity with which they punish sexual
offences, 71 sqq.
——, Western, 74
Australian aborigines, their precautions against ghosts, 137
Avebury, Lord, 159
Avoidance, ceremonial, of relations by marriage, 75 sqq.; a
precaution against incest, 75, 84 sqq., 93; of wife’s mother, 75
sqq., 86 sq., 90 sq.; between father-in-law and daughter-in-law,
76; between various relations, 76 sq.; between father and
daughter, 78, 85, 87; between father-in-law and son-in-law, 79
sq.; of wife of wife’s brother, 80; of brothers-in-law and sisters-
in-law, 81; of future parents-in-law, 81, 83; between woman and
her father-in-law, 82; between a man and his father-in-law, 82,
83; of blood relations, 84 sqq.; between brother and sister, 85,
86, 87, 88, 90; between mother and son, 85, 86, 87
Awemba, the, of Northern Rhodesia, 66, 79, 103 sq., 120