Can animals be persons? To this question, scientific and
philosophical consensus has taken the form of a resounding, 'No!'
In this book, Mark Rowlands disagrees. Not only can animals be
persons, many of them probably are. Taking, as his starting point,
John Locke's classic definition of a person, as "a thinking
intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider
itself the same thinking thing, in different times and places,"
Rowlands argues that many animals can satisfy all of these
conditions. A person is an individual in which four features
coalesce: consciousness, rationality, self-awareness and
other-awareness, and many animals are such individuals.
Consciousness-something that is like to have an experience-is
widely distributed through the animal kingdom. Many animals are
capable of both causal and logical reasoning. Many animals are also
self-aware, since a form of self-awareness is essentially built
into the possession of conscious experience. And some animals are
capable of a kind of awareness of the minds of others, quite
independently of whether they possess a theory of mind. This is not
just a book about animals, however. As well as being fascinating in
their own right, animals, as Claude Levi-Strauss once put it, are
"good to think." In this seamless interweaving of the empirical
study of animal minds with philosophy and its history, this book
makes a powerful case for the idea that reflection on animals
allows us to better understand each of these four pillars of
personhood, and so illuminates what means for any individual-animal
or human-to be conscious, rational, self- and other-aware.
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