animalism

English

Etymology

From animal +‎ -ism.

Noun

animalism (countable and uncountable, plural animalisms)

1. (philosophy, ontology) The doctrine that humans are merely animals, and lack any spirituality. [from 18th c.]
   • 2014, Neil A. Manson, Robert W. Barnard, The Bloomsbury Companion to Metaphysics, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, page 237:

     Animalism understands the human person and the human animal to be identical. The major appeal of animalism is that it avoids the spatially coincident thinkers discussed earlier.

2. Animal-like behaviour or appetite; brutality. [from 19th c.]
   • 1874, Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life, IV.6:

     The wife is what her husband makes her, and his rude animalism had made her the nervous invalid she was.

3. In a positive sense: natural animal activity; physicality, natural energy. [from 19th c.]
4. (Can we verify⁽⁺⁾ this sense?) Animal liberation.
   • 2018, Andrew Linzey, Clair Linzey, The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics, page 111:

     For this reason, if before the 1990s animalism was politically nonexistent, much changed after the publication of Animal Liberation.

   • 2019, Michelle T. King, Culinary Nationalism in Asia:

     Her organization's website perfectly illustrates the conflation of a religious ethos and animalism: it calls for the protection of cows for ecological reasons while referring to Hindu cosmology (People for Animals 2013).

   • 2020, Felice Cimatti, Carlo Salzani, Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy, page 22:

     The contemporary movement for animal rights, for example, is explicitly anti-Cartesian and indeed proposes to consider non-human animals (at least some among them) as subjectivities, if not as persons in the juridical sense. What this animalism does not see is that in this way it continues, paradoxically, to remain trapped in Descartes' dualistic apparatus.

Related terms

• animalist

See also

• speciesism

Further reading

• animalism (philosophy) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia