Meaning

(philosophy, ontology) The doctrine that humans are merely animals, and lack any spirituality..

Definitions by Sense

1. (philosophy, ontology) The doctrine that humans are merely animals, and lack any spirituality.
2. Animal-like behaviour or appetite; brutality.
3. In a positive sense: natural animal activity; physicality, natural energy.
4. Animal liberation; animal rights advocacy.

Example Sentences

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.

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

Halpin [Frayser]’s death and the post-mortem demoniacalness of the well-bred Southern woman, lops off the grafted branches of the human and cuts it down to that stump of itself which is primordial, persistent, unconscious animalism.

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

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).

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.

Word Forms

• animalisms

Synonyms for animalism

Related Words

When Should You Use Animalism?

Use animalism when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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