You may think you’re a mammal, and that dogs and cows and whales are mammals, but really there aren’t any mammals at all. There couldn’t be! Here’s a philosophical argument to prove it.
1. Every mammal has a mammal for a mother.
2. If there have been any mammals at all, there have been only a finite number of mammals.
3. But if there has been even one mammal, then by (1), there have been an infinity of mammals, which
contradicts (2), so there can’t have been any mammals. It’s a contradiction in terms.
The Prime Mammal must be whichever mammal in the set of mammals was the first to have all the essential mammalian features. If there is no definable essence of mammal—and evolutionary biology shows us that there are no such essences—these philosophers are in trouble. So, as a general rule, consider ignoring the philosophers’ demand for an essence, a defining feature, a “truth-maker.” It typically—not always—starts a wild goose chase that may be diverting but is only moderately illuminating at best.
The insistence that there must be a Prime Mammal, even if we can never know when and where it existed, is an example of hysterical realism. It invites us to reflect that if we just knew enough, we’d see—we’d have to see—that there is a special property of mammal-hood that defines mammals once and for all. To deny this, philosophers sometimes say, is to confuse metaphysics with epistemology: the study of what there (really) is with the study of what we can know about what there is.
Source:
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Book Intuition Pumps
