It will come as no surprise to most that Snowdon offers both a detailed and clearly argued defence of animalism, the thesis that, ‘Each of us is identical with, is one and the same thing as, an animal.’ (7). His view is to be contrasted with forms of essentialism whereby the person is a different substance from the animal they would often be identified with. The leading alternative candidate is a psychological entity that survives a discontinuity (psychological or physical) breaking the link between the animal and its psyche. Aristotle denied that such a conceptual break could be coherently articulated – ‘The soul is to the body as sight to the eye.’ (De Anima, 412b21) so the view espoused by Snowdon is at the heart of a strand of philosophical naturalism that leads to vibrant current work on embodied cognition. That work has a conceptual affinity with phenomenology but Snowdon's project is entirely analytic and depends on sparser, more traditional, arguments. He notes the dependence of such arguments, inter alia, on our untutored and variously sustainable intuitions and his arguments are unrelenting in deconstructing one putative reason after another for refusing to identify oneself as a person as the animal one seems to be. Snowdon's work is careful and painstaking, extensively researched, and replete with down to earth argumentation that takes nothing for granted and gives away nothing of metaphysical importance and he exposes case after case of reasoning based on insecure assumptions. Time and again, examining various arguments for common metaphysical manoeuvres such as Non-Substantial or Pure Person transfers, he concludes that it is an open question whether any such things are possible (192).

Snowdon concedes that actual cases that seem to invite interpretations whereby the person is no longer equivalent to the animal we might otherwise identify them with offer some fragile support to arguments against the animalist view. Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), split brain cases and multi-headed animals are all submitted to scrutiny via a stark common sense realism (small ‘r’): ‘to think of MPD as a mental illness presupposes the existence of a patient who can be traced through time and who can be classified as abnormal’ (154); ‘split brain cases … are to be counted as showing that various disunities are possible amongst the experiences of a single subject’ (174); ‘the general category [of multi-headed organisms] … should be described as involving two organisms which are fused to different degrees’ (186). Many such down to earth, naturalistic, arguments rehearse strands of thought found in historical philosophers committed to metaphysically alert forms of naturalism and recall their insightful analyses. In discussing the unity of consciousness, for example, Snowdon revives the Kantian exposition (in the Anthropology) for an animal form of the sensorio communi whereby ‘the experiences of a single subject must present a unified spatial world’ (162). Kant also outlines a second sense of sensus communis that embeds us in a human collective and shared forms of reason or discourse that is recalled in Snowdon's ‘referential arguments’ that invoke telling considerations in philosophical logic and philosophy of language.

Kant's discussion of training in judgment and the acquisition of concepts through experience is also echoed in one of Snowdon's very Aristotelian passages discussing MPD:

Traces of Peter Strawson's logical analysis of mental ascriptions (also at the heart of Husserl's Fifth Cartesian meditation and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations) are evident in other framing remarks ‘We assign experiences and beliefs (etc.) to human beings including ourselves picked out in our personal referential language’ as a result and only on the basis of abstraction of mental ascriptions from everyday life and our dealings with each other can we ‘form the general idea of a thing which possesses properties of that kind’ (175).

Snowdon's robust and common-sense naturalism is, as already noted, meat and drink to anybody fond of embodied cognition theory and phenomenology in general. The everyday examples evoke a kind of realism (that is deflationary rather than needing to be spelt with a capital ‘R’) by discussing alleged person but not animal (P &~A) cases (Non-Substantial and Pure person Transfers) in terms of the scenarios as they would play out if it were someone to whom we are close that was affected (my mother, my daughter, my son). This common-sense method brings language back from ‘being on holiday’ where the overblown metaphysics can bewitch us so we forget our real human engagement in the world. His examples, filled out in terms of the everyday language we might be tempted to use to frame our experiences, and explored to make explicit the imagined metaphysical processes that shake our intuitions, generate considerable ‘doubt about its being correct to think that such a process moves the person’ (194). The doubt about what is being imagined and whether, in fact, it makes sense (Wittgenstein, PI, #395) delivers a palpable hit to much of the literature spawned by ‘the personal identity industry’ (cf. ‘a cloud of metaphysics distilled into a drop of grammar’).

Snowdon's careful and relentless reasoning is illustrated by one or two areas in which he favours a deflationary and critical view that undercuts some common philosophical moves. In relation to dead animals, he notes our widespread practices of referring to the animal that has died as the very same animal who was alive and our elaborate rituals to confer certain types of regard, proper to the animal itself, on its corpse (such as ensuring that it accompanies its master into the land of death). These practices of reference and ways of acting towards those that have died, with analogous rituals in relation to our human dead, subtend certain attitudes or beliefs that create tensions within the philosophical mind as it struggles with scientific realities such as cell death, dissolution of tissues, inertness of the dead brain as a mere material object, and so on. We commonly and intuitively deal with these tensions by noticing and maintaining distinctions between life as it is experienced and lived and a sparse or mechanistic dissection of processes of life in accordance with the inhuman ‘view from nowhere’, an objective or disengaged stance which none of us can sustainably adopt (as Hume noted). To pretend that a purified version of a view from nowhere delivered by speculative metaphysics based on imaginability (or an equally flimsy epistemological foundation) is somehow rational is to depart from Snowdon's grounded and rigorous view and from the hurley-burley of life in which words have their meaning. Paying due respect to such unfashionable things as philosophical logic in deciding between rival views and thereby refusing to depart from what Kant calls ‘the land of pure understanding … enclosed in unalterable boundaries by nature itself’ (B294) is painstaking and hard and often looks unheroic in comparison to revisionary metaphysics. But Snowdon's work displays a mastery of current analytic philosophy, putting that mastery to telling use with a canny eye on contemporary scientific discussion. The blend of a scientific orientation with close attention to our natural ways of speaking displays the possibility that, in a contested and partially described case fostering certain intuitions, ‘we do not know, and we should not think that we know’ (224) how we would describe the case or even whether the concepts we are using would allow a coherent description.

Snowdon is generous enough to accommodate protagonists in the animalism and psychologism debate to the extent of allowing such speculations as that of Shoemaker's Brownson (Brown's brain in Robinson's body) but he then invokes indeterminability considerations such that, in a brain transplant case for instance, the relation between Brownson and Brown ‘has to be determined empirically. It is not something that we can claim to know as philosophers’ (225). Snowdon's suspension of belief is well advised in the light of current embodied cognition research and the role of the soma in the psychosomatic unity that is a speaking, loving, running, jumping, person. He is right to insist that ‘it surely cannot be ruled out that our psychological states are grounded in a system distributed over the entire body’; indeed some would say that is where the money is in neuro-cognitive research.

What is more, Snowdon backs up this warranted scepticism with a diagnosis of the role of intuitions in our philosophical puzzlement. His alternative approach stresses reference and the problems to which that might be prone in certain metaphysical frameworks (e.g. those encountered in many P &~A cases). He does not explore, as an intersubjective theorist might, the fact that reference and all linguistic skills are learned and corrected in discursive contexts where manifest human beings are what we cognitively track (through actual bodily interactions with them) and that our second nature, informed by the way in which culture has shaped cognition, is the basis on which we negotiate difficulties with identity, ownership and moral responsibility. Therefore ‘talk of the person or subject going with the brain itself needs careful handling’ (230). Snowdon explores the problems of self-reference that could arise in a person transplant situation and these potential problems raise, a fortiori, understandings of insanity and an unheimlich mode of life (with profound disruptions of psycho-somatic unity and the self) found in the philosophy and psychiatry literature and radically problematizing the nature and integrity of the self in certain unusual and neuro-cognitively striking cases. These uncertainties, subtended by our current use and understanding of an interconnected repertoire of the relevant concepts, further undermine the possibility of drawing well-grounded metaphysical conclusions from the speculative ‘data’ provided and the intuitions pumped into life thereby.

Multiples and the dual use of principles of interpretation demonstrate the problems that we tend to run into. Principles of interpretation and individuation of mental lives, shaped by considerations of rationality and coherence, are often used as persuasive evidence that more than one person inhabits a given human being but Snowdon is not easily swayed. He posits a case where a young man suddenly exhibits deeply unreasonable thinking that evinces a serious mental disorder (of a type distinct from Multiple Personality Disorder but also marked by highly abnormal states of mind). In such cases, ‘all bets are off’, as it were, in relation to the normal practices of mental ascription, the constraints that should be obeyed, and inferences therefrom). The dose of realism is welcome.

The unity of consciousness and extravagant conclusions about human beings clustering around philosophical analyses are subjected to the same deflationary treatment whereby perfectly ordinary, common-sense knowledge about the development and elaboration of a human being's mental life through practices, in which we are subject to semantic and cognitive disciplines that culminate in the relatively unified good-enough mental life that most of us exhibit, defuses many revisionary metaphysical claims. Snowdon's measured attack is levelled finally against Butler's performative view in which human beings are distinguished from animals by the very fact that Kant focuses on in his Anthropology – our freedom and ability to self-make under the discursive pressure of a community of thinking beings. Here Snowdon's opposition to ‘thinking of ourselves as fundamentally something other than an animal’ (249) runs counter to a strand of thought originating in Aristotle's idea of second nature and the self-making of Kant's pragmatic anthropology both of which address the problematic nature of our being and warn us against thinking of ourselves purely physiologically. The difficulty surfaces in Hacking's ‘looping effect of human kinds’ and is taken seriously by Baker in a way that perhaps shares common ground with Snowdon's promissory note in regard to animalism: ‘It is not to be expected that the full resources of this approach have emerged so far.’ The alternative tradition grounded in phenomenology and embodied cognition theory aligns itself with Snowdon in combating ‘the bewitchment of our intelligence by philosophy’ and certain modes of debate that neglect our everyday dealings with one another. This book is a contemporary and provoking challenge to many strands of current metaphysics which, as Kant remarks, release us from the ‘land of truth’ and set sail upon ‘a broad and stormy ocean, the true seat of illusion’ where a philosopher can be ceaselessly deceived with empty hopes while ‘looking around for new discoveries’ (B295). Unfortunately the incautious philosopher so boldly setting forth becomes entwined in adventures ‘from which he can never escape and yet also never bring to an end’. Snowdon draws a line under such speculative metaphysics and advises us to continue searching philosophical inquiry ‘in the exploration of the way of thinking of ourselves as animals’, a way that is likely to have significant implications for philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, and philosophical theology.