ABSTRACT
Thomas Reid was a Dualist. He regarded the self as indivisible and wrote that: identity has no fixed nature when applied to bodies and very often questions about it are questions about words. According to contemporary Animalists people terrestrials are human beings. The pronoun 'I' in each of people's mouths refers to a human being. In other words, each of the people is numerically identical to a human being. A real-life example illustrates the Animalist view. A human being can survive in a coma, irretrievably devoid of mentality. Animalism is not the implausible view that, of necessity, all persons are animals. This is implausible since people can conceive of worlds in which persons are, for example, silicon-based life forms. The Humean view is often characterized as a kind of reductionism, since it attempts to reduce the self to its constituent parts.
