Tristan Tondino

Eric T. Olson argues for a position in personal identity called Animalism. Olson's definition of ‘what we are’ is what the biological community currently defines as the ‘human animal’. While Olson argues his definition is determinate and anti-relativist, I object by maintaining that his definition is fundamentally soft relativist. This is accomplished by asking : 1) why favour the biological definition over other cultural definitions? – and by arguing : 2) that nothing stops the biological definition from changing ; 3) that the biological definition is classificatory and not ontologically explanatory ; 4) that biology may drop the concept ‘human animal’ leaving no definition of ‘what we are’. Finally, I look at which ontological decisions Olson makes and ask if there is any hope for Animalism and for the human philosopher with no proven ontology. In my conclusion, I follow Olson’s surprising admission by suggesting that I have no idea what we are

Abstract: What this paper proposes is 1) that Gettier problems are noticeably similar to a computer virus (I call it a cognitive virus) and 2) that the Gettier problems are an incredibly good argument for what I refer to as Belief Radicalism. I will argue that we never have more than beliefs based on evidential beliefs or evidential inferences and that all propositions including logical ones can be reformatted as beliefs with no loss of explanatory power. What we mean by true and fact is that there is a category of justified belief about which we believe there can be no substantial contrary evidence. The goal of this paper is to show that knowledge is a redundant concept deriving from “folk psychology” and that this concept can be eliminated and replaced with justified beliefs.