Paul Snowdon on Animalism
I first came across Paul Snowdon’s thinking on animalism as a result of attending his lectures on the subject in Oxford in what I believe was probably the 1990s, though I have no reliable way of checking that date. Though Paul had been my doctoral supervisor some years previously, I had gleaned rather little from our supervisions concerning what his views on any substantive philosophical matters actually were. Paul was a fantastic supervisor, but part of what made him fantastic was the fact that he was always mainly focused on what his supervisees thought or had to say, and I always found it hard to be sure, therefore, what he himself actually thought about any given philosophical issue. It was therefore a wonderful revelation to me to attend the lecture series in which he explained and defended the doctrine he called ‘animalism’.
Animalism, according to Paul’s definition, is the claim that ‘(e)ach of us is identical with, is one and the same thing as, an animal’ (Snowdon, 2014: 7), a position in the debate concerning the nature of personal identity over time which owes its current respectability and much increased popularity, at least in part, to Paul’s meticulous defence of the thesis. Animalism was already around in the air in Oxford (though it was not initially called ’animalism’) at the time. By the time I attended Paul’s lectures, I had already become somewhat attracted to the idea that a person was essentially a human being through having read David Wiggins’ Sameness and Substance, but it was Paul’s presentation of the issues that first really made the connection for me between the idea that personal identity in ‘our’ case was essentially human identity and the idea that we were therefore essentially animals, with the same kinds of identity criteria as other animals.
Anyone who has read Locke on personal identity will already be familiar with Locke’s distinction between ‘the man’ and ‘the person’ and with the idea that under certain kinds of conditions (for example complete memory loss), A can be the same man as B without being the same person as B. This idea had already attracted criticism – in particular, logical worries about the coherence of so-called ‘relative identity’ had been raised by others (including, for example, David Wiggins and Gareth Evans). Paul, though, was perhaps the first person to make utterly vivid in a completely intuitive and non-formal way just how bizarre some of the commitments of views like this would have to be. For ‘men’ are surely psychologically endowed, are they not? asked Paul – they are thinkers and imaginers, they have emotions and perceptions. But then, if the person is really distinct from the man, we have to accept that in the place where I am currently seated, there are *two* psychologically endowed beings in the same place at the same time, presumably thinking the same things at the same time. And surely, even if this is a formally possible position, it is not an attractive or plausible claim. By means of making such points as these, Paul swiftly brought me (and doubtless many others in that audience) to wonder whether animalism, in providing an easy way to avoid such unappealing suggestions, might be a thesis that deserved a very serious hearing.
Paul also brought into the debate concerning personal identity questions about the identity conditions of other kinds of animal. Readers of his (2014) book, Persons, Animals and Ourselves, which was eventually produced from the material begun in those lectures will likely recall his cat, Topsy, who makes an early appearance. Of Topsy, Paul claims, it seems reasonable to suppose that it isn’t possible to deprive her of existence, so long as the animal present wherever Topsy is at t1 remains alive and in one piece at t2 – even if somehow Topsy’s psychological features were to be removed or changed in the interim. Thinking about these issues in the case of non-human animals certainly helped me begin to feel that certain intuitions which it seems possible to generate about the persistence (or non-persistence) of one’s own identity in various kinds of imaginary scenario were likely to be unreliable as means by which to test philosophical theories, given how uninviting they seemed to be in the case of Topsy. Surely Topsy lacking her memories, for example, would still be Topsy, my demented cat? But it seemed very odd to think that the metaphysics of a creature such as myself should be so extremely different from the metaphysics of a cat. The lack of continuity between animal and human realms presupposed by the kinds of views Paul characterised as ‘mentalist’ began to look more and more outrageous to me, in the face of Paul’s gentle questioning, than they ever had before. Paul’s way of setting up the debate shifted me away from an overly introspective approach to the consideration of what personal identity might depend upon toward a more biological one – and thereby set me on a course on which I have remained throughout the rest of my philosophical career.
Something else I recall from those lectures was the impression which Paul’s meticulous treatment of brain transplant thought experiments (what Paul would have called a [P & ~A ] (person and not-animal) case) made on me. In a brain transplant case, the cerebrum of a functioning human being (supposed to be the ‘seat’ of that person’s conscious life, memories, thought processes, etc.) is removed and transplanted either into another animal body, suitably altered to receive it, or into a vat able to sustain it, or into a robot body ….etc., leaving the original animal behind – decerebrated, but alive. We are supposed to find appealing the intuition that were this to happen to a person, that person would go along with their transplanted cerebrum, the supposed physical basis of their mental life, rather than being reduced to a non-psychologically endowed, but still metabolically functioning animal. Paul needed to argue, if animalism was to be defended, that such intuitions – even if widespread and powerful – cannot legitimately be utilised in arguments opposing the thesis.
As a student of Kathy Wilkes, whose book on the problematic nature of thought experiments in philosophy had just appeared, I think I was already inclined to suppose that the ‘brain transplant intuition’ needed to be treated with extreme caution. What impressed me, though, about Paul’s lectures, was how careful he was in trying to understand why exactly this might be the case. He was persuasive, for instance, that none of Wilkes’ arguments about the dangers of philosophical thought experiments really applied to the brain transplant thought experiment and so that further scrutiny was needed. Paul argued instead that the attitude we should accept when we are asked what happens to the person in an imaginary brain transplant case is that we simply don’t know, at any rate not in advance of having developed the overall, holistically plausible theory of personal identity that might entail an answer – and that since we don’t know, it is illegitimate to proceed as though we do know, by accepting the intuitions generated by the thought experiment as any kind of strike against animalism.
Paul will be remembered for his powerful defence of animalism – but it is worth saying that his thinking on this topic was notable for far more merely than the defence of that position. The way Paul went about setting out the issues had altogether larger implications for that debate, for it freed discussion from much confusion and set up helpful ways of formulating issues and questions which are still in widespread use. One big shift which his work produced, for example, which had implications for all writers on the topic of personal identity, was a cessation of the excessive and fruitless focus on the concept of a person which had characterised much previous work. When I first studied the topic of personal identity as an undergraduate, I read numerous articles concerning the question whether some human being which had undergone this or that kind of psychological or physical change would or would not count as a ‘person’ – ultimately not usually a very interesting question, nor one to which definite answers could always be expected. Paul’s work released us once and for all from this overly conceptual focus by stipulating that for his purposes, speaking of a ‘person’ ought to be taken merely as a useful means of speaking about ‘one of us’. By means of this stratagem, Paul showed us how to think about questions concerning personal identity over time as questions, simply, about ‘us’, without building in any prior and potentially tendentious commitments as to what properties one might have to possess in order to count as being one of us. That, after all, was what we were trying to find out – not something we should have been assuming from the outset in our discussions.
A long time elapsed between the lectures on personal identity which I believe I attended in the 1990s and the publication of ‘Persons, Animals and Ourselves’. In his preface to the book, Paul laments the “hesitations and work habits” which resulted in the delay. I suppose it might have been nice to have Paul’s thoughts on the question of animalism written down in definitive form earlier than we did. But for myself, I don’t at all regret the delay. It is always extremely hard to find anything wrong with Paul’s reasoning – surely at least partly a product of the ‘hesitations’ which led him to take the time to rethink and reformulate ideas he was not quite happy with. And as both a slow and hesitant philosopher myself, it is cheering to me to see that a philosopher as wonderful as Paul also took a long time to write what he wanted to say in precisely the way he wanted to say it.