animalism

Etymology

Definitions

1. 1

   The doctrine that humans are merely animals, and lack any spirituality.

   • 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.
2. 2

   Animal-like behaviour or appetite

   Animal-like behaviour or appetite; brutality.

   • 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.
3. 3

   In a positive sense

   In a positive sense: natural animal activity; physicality, natural energy.

4. ›+ 1 more definitionshow fewer

   1. 4

      Animal liberation

      Animal liberation; animal rights advocacy.

      • 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 neighborhood

• neighboranimalist
• neighborspeciesism