Abstract

This chapter covers the issue of the material constitution of the self and its identity over time. Animalism is the view that a person is identical with the human animal and not with either an immaterial soul or a psychological continuum. Jayanta, the ninth century Nyāya philosopher, argues very tellingly against Animalism. His argument is that the manner of persistence involved in the preservation of first‐person phenomena and other capacities constitutive of selfhood is not the same as that which characterises the persistence of physical objects. This chapter shows that the Animalism this argument targets is logically independent of the account of the emergence of the mental from the physical described in the last chapter, which therefore survives the critique unscathed.