The Knowing Animal

The final volume in the trilogy, that begins with The Hand and continues with I Am, argues that knowledge is a mode of awareness unique to human beings. The difference between humans and all other sentient creatures is sufficiently important to call man 'the knowing animal'.

This book examines the profound difference between knowledge-a form of awareness that things are the case-and the sentience (sensations and appetites) experienced by all animals. It goes on to reconstruct the emergence of knowledge in humans and connects this with the sense of being-a subject who encounters partially fathomable and independent objects. This account of knowledge underpins a non-relativistic, non-deflationary account of truth.

Tallis re-thinks the scope of the theory of knowledge. He rescues it from the post-Fregean tradition that demotes epistemology in favor of the theory of meaning; from the biologism of those who assimilate knowledge to a consciousness explained in neural terms, and of pragmatists who 'Darwinize' knowledge; and from the Heideggerian tradition which by-passes the theory of knowledge altogether by giving priority to being.

By approaching philosophical questions about knowledge and truth from a new angle, The Knowing Animal completes the trilogy that revolutionizes a fundamental task of philosophy-to make sense of a creature that is both a part of nature and apart from it.