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Overview"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." Full Product DetailsAuthor: Professor Mark Rowlands (University of Miami)Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA Imprint: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 9780190846060ISBN 10: 0190846062 Publication Date: 15 February 2019 Audience: General/trade , General Format: Undefined Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print  This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsReviewsAuthor InformationMark Rowlands is Professor Philosophy at the University of Miami. He received a D.Phil. from Oxford University. He has published nineteen books, including his previous books with OUP, Can Animals be Moral? and Memory and the Self. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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