Eric T. Olson (1997), The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology, New York: Oxford University Press (Library of Congress 96007018; x, 189 pp.). Paperback 1999 (ISBN 0-19-513423-0), on Oxford Academic as DOI 10.1093/0195134230.001.0001.
On the citation. The brief’s details are right: author, title, subtitle, publisher and 1997. The DOI is the 1999 paperback’s, since the 1997 hardback has none; the pagination Crossref gives for the chapters (text to p. 168) matches the Library of Congress extent, so the editions appear to share it.
Key takeaways
Registered from the publisher’s abstract, the catalogue record and the chapter list, not a reading.
- The abstract, verbatim: “This book argues that our identity over time involves no psychological facts. Psychological accounts of personal identity lead to grave metaphysical problems, and the arguments for them are inconclusive. The book argues that we are animals, and thus have the purely biological identity conditions of animals.”
- Contents (Crossref chapter DOIs, with pages): Introduction (3–6); Psychology and Personal Identity (7–21); Persistence (22–41); Why We Need not Accept the Psychological Approach (42–72); Was I Ever a Fetus? (73–93); Are People Animals? (94–123); The Biological Approach (124–153); Alternatives (154–168).
- Library of Congress subject headings: animals (philosophy); philosophical anthropology; self (philosophy).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request to fill out the record’s coverage of personal identity, as the founding statement of animalism. Its author’s SEP entry (LIT-454), read in full, compresses its argument in §§6–7 and cites it for the claim that a person-to-person memory criterion says nothing about non-persons (“Olson 1997: 22–26”). Dufner’s survey (LIT-130) names it as the primary source for the biological view. No anthology topic holds it, it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice, and the anthology does not hold it.
Deferred because it was not read. What it bears on, inferred from the
abstract, the contents and the SEP entry, not from the book:
- Against the narrative and minimal selves. “Personal identity without psychology” is the opposite pole from Schechtman’s narrative self-constitution (LIT-468) and from Dennett’s self as a centre of narrative gravity (LIT-442). The SEP entry’s way of reconciling them is to say they answer different questions: theirs is characterization, Olson’s is persistence.
- Machines. On the SEP entry’s account, animalism is about human people and is consistent with “intelligent robots” being people. So the book does not by itself deny machine personhood. It denies that psychological continuity is what human persistence consists in, which is the relation uploads and copies would rely on.
individuationis carried because the book’s question, what it takes for something to persist, is asked of organisms in general before it is asked of us.
Access when seeded: Crossref (abstract, ISBN, chapter list); the Library of Congress JSON record; Open Library (edition list, Internet Archive copy “borrowable” only, so not opened). The Oxford Academic page returned HTTP 403 to this session. Google Books’ API refused for an exhausted daily quota.