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Bodily continuity theories hold that personal identity over time is constituted by the persistence of the body or the biological organism. Animalism (van Inwagen, Olson) is the most prominent version: you are a human animal, and you persist just as long as the animal does — roughly, as long as biological life continues. This view handles puzzle cases differently from psychological theories: in the fission case, neither survivor is you because the original animal no longer exists. Animalism faces the thinking animal problem and challenges from cases of brain transplant — if your brain is transplanted to a new skull, is the original body or the body with your brain 'you'?
Read Olson's The Human Animal Chapter 1-3. Then apply animalism to the case of persistent vegetative state — does the animal persist, and does this match our intuitions about the person?
From your study of personal identity, you know the central puzzle: what makes you at age 40 the same individual as the child you were at age 5? The cells have changed, the memories are partial, the personality has shifted. Yet we say it is the same person. Two major families of answer compete. Psychological continuity theories say the connecting thread is mental: overlapping chains of memories, intentions, beliefs, and personality traits. Bodily continuity theories say the connecting thread is physical: you are the same because your body — specifically, the biological organism — persists through time. Animalism is the most developed version of this second view.
Animalism, defended by philosophers Peter van Inwagen and Eric Olson, makes a surprisingly direct claim: you are a human animal. Not a person who happens to inhabit a body, not a mind that uses a body, but the biological organism itself. On this view, you persist just as long as the animal persists — roughly, as long as the organism maintains biological life, whether or not it maintains any psychological continuity at all. A human being in a persistent vegetative state, with no memories and no conscious experience, is still the same individual as the person who lived those earlier years — because the animal is still alive. The identity relation tracks biological, not psychological, facts.
This has sharp implications for puzzle cases. Consider the brain transplant case: your brain is removed and placed in a new skull. Where do you go — with the brain, or with the original body? Animalism has a clear answer: your brain is a part of the animal, not the animal itself. The original animal is the one with the brainstem still intact running core biological functions. (Some animalists bite the bullet and say you go with the brain if the brain-in-new-skull resumes life as a functioning organism, but this depends on what "the animal" tracks.) Now consider fission: your brain is split and each hemisphere is implanted in a different skull, producing two psychologically continuous survivors. Psychological continuity theories struggle here — both survivors have equal claim to being you, but identity is not a one-to-many relation. Animalism avoids the problem cleanly: neither survivor is you because the original organism no longer exists as a single animal. You die; two new animals begin.
The most formidable challenge to animalism is the thinking animal problem, which cuts in the other direction. Right now, as you sit reading this, there is a human animal in your seat thinking your thoughts. According to animalism, that animal is you. But before you became conscious, there was already an animal there. And if that animal is you, then there are two thinkers wherever you are — the person and the animal. Since persons and animals coincide but are not identical (persons can die while animals persist, or vice versa), we seem to have two distinct things thinking the same thoughts at the same time. This is the puzzle animalism must explain.
Animalism's greatest strength is its simplicity and its alignment with how we ordinarily think about organisms. When you ask where you were last Tuesday, the animal theory gives a clear spatial answer: wherever your body was. It avoids the baroque metaphysics of "person-stages," "continuers," and fission scenarios that psychological theories require. Whether that simplicity comes at an acceptable cost — especially in cases where biology and psychology dramatically diverge — is the central question the theory must answer.
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