Evangelian Collings

I am very pleased to share that my paper “Animalism has a pregnancy problem” has been accepted at Synthese!

Abstract

Animalism claims that each of us is identical with a human animal. Animalists
point to biology to inform a definition of ‘organism’ that can supply our existence and persistence conditions. But biologists use multiple distinct definitions of ‘organism’ that give different verdicts on what counts as an individual organism in certain ‘problem’ cases. Importantly for animalism, one of these cases occurs in human animals: placental pregnancy. Under some definitions, the fetus and pregnant animal are separate organisms, but they are one unified organism under other definitions. Animalists who want to defer to biology for our existence and persistence conditions, rather than merely point to it, are left with a problem. They cannot choose just one definition of organism, but neither can they accept a plural notion of organism while preserving the structure of their central claim that we are human animals. The case of pregnancy shows that animalism cannot
pass the buck for defining the existence conditions of animals to biologists, and reveals a challenge for the view in accounting for our existence as individuals throughout the duration of our life cycles.