Stephen R. L. Clark

Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life is a study of the fossils of the Burgess Shale of British Columbia. My concern is with the morals that Gould draws, with the ‘new picture of life’ that, he says, the reinterpreted Burgess animals compel. I conclude that his case is not established. (1) There may have been reasons to do with ‘fitness’ why most of the Burgess animals left no descendants, even if we cannot guess exactly what they were. (2) We do not know that our past is dotted with the kind of mass extinctions that are needed for the random evolution that he proposes. (3) Even if what happened does rest on random variation and largely random selection, it does not follow that there are no standing forms that will be constantly re‐instantiated. If Rational Life, in particular, is not special, then we have no right to think the world we experience bears any remote resemblance to a putative real world. (4) Even if there are no such forms, the fact that nothing in the state of things required us to exist is no good reason to say that No one requires us to. What Gould says does count against a simple progressivism, but not against an older and more orthodox theology. It also has implications for the Search for Extra‐Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Consistent materialists are almost bound to suggest that, if it exists at all, is no more than epiphenomenal. A correct understanding of the real requires that everything we do and say is no more than a product of whatever processes are best described by physics, without any privileged place, person, time or scale of action. Consciousness is a myth, or at least a figment. Plotinus was no materialist: for him, it is Soul and Intellect that are more real than the phenomena we misdescribe as material. Nor does he suppose that consciousness depends on language (as Stoics and modern materialists have sometimes said): wordless experience is actually superior. And much of what counts towards our present consciousness is to be discarded. It is better not to remember most of what now seems more significant to us; better to discard images; better that the intellect be than, losing any sense of separation between subject and object. The goal of the Plotinian intellectual is to join, but it is a mark of the good dancer that she is not conscious of what she does. There is therefore a strange confluence between Plotinus and modern materialists: our experience at least is transitory, deceitful, epiphenomenal, and is to be encountered when we have shed our illusions.

"Philosophical speculation and science fiction are united in this: what is now obvious is mot likely to be false, or at best a transient mode of being. In exploring future possibilities, the author introduces science fiction writers and contemporary philosophers alike to the riches of their twin traditions. What is the likely future of our species? What sort of global religious feeling is likely to prevail? How far can we go in engineering living artefacts, or our own descendants? Are we on the cusp of a new reality, in which we shall have to choose how 'human' we will remain, what seemingly obvious feelings and beliefs need to be revised or re-imagined? Is it even possible that we are living out a dream, devised by the last intelligences in the last days of the universe? What now exists seems to most of us to be obvious, or even eternal, but the truth is otherwise: even our most trusted intuitions and our most stable institutions (as they seem) could have been entirely different, and may be different again. Our ordinary life may be a dream and a delirium, as ancient philosophers thought, and our chief task is to wake up"--Publisher's description on back cover.

Twenty years ago, people thought only cranks or sentimentalists could be seriously concerned about the treatment of non-human animals. However, since then philosophers, scientists and welfarists have raised public awareness of the issue; and they have begun to lay the foundations for an enormous change in human practice. This book is a record of the development of 'animal rights' through the eyes of one highly-respected and well-known thinker. This book brings together for the first time Stephen R.L. Clark's major essays in one volume. Written with characteristic clarity and persuasion, Animals and Their Moral Standing will be essential reading for both philosophers and scientists, as well as the general reader concerned by the debates over animal rights and treatment.