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Despite the opinion, prevalent today both in academic and non-academic quarters, that philosophy is a thing of the past, a thing to be found exclusively in the textbooks of intellectual history, the love of wisdom is flourishing like never before. Having thrown off the straight-jackets of metaphysical reasoning, living thought turns towards corporeity stamped by finitude and sexual difference, to the world around us, to the rhythms of the earth, and to a wealth of non-Western philosophical traditions.

Professor Eldridge’s paper is an attempt to shed light on the genesis and rationality of animism, which is the belief that human beings have souls, or, by extension, the belief that animals, plants or even rocks have souls; that is, that they are subjects of feeling or consciousness, or display intelligence, in ways that ensouled human beings do.1