理性的動物

Abstract

The recent anti-Lockean Animalists hold that the so-called problem of personal identity is a matter of persistence of a living organism and charge the traditional Lockean view with some ontological puzzles as to how we can be a kind of animals. This newcomer proposal, however, makes it difficult to understand the importance of our distinctive psychological nature, and results in analogous puzzles about the relation between an animal and its body. The problem is to bridge the gap between the mental and the biological so as to make an entire picture of ourselves, i.e. persons as a kind of animals essentially endowed with affluent psychology. A promising solution is to abandon the reductionist assumption prevalent in this controversy and to accept our persistence as primitive relative to both the psychological and the biological continuities.