Animal rights  

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"It is also a significant circumstance that the earliest European advocates of animals' rights based their arguments and appeals upon panpsychism, or the essential unity of all forms of sentient existence, and upon the assumption that beasts are, like men, emanations from the infinite source of being and parts of the general soul of the universe. This is true of the Ionic school, the oldest group of Greek philosophers, of whom Anaximander anticipated the latest inferences from the doctrine of evolution concerning the descent of man, of Pythagoras, Empedocles, Theophrastus, the Stoics, Plotinus and Porphyry, and the Neoplatonists and Neopythagoreans in general. In modern times the same theory has been held by Hamann, Herder, Schleiermacher, Krause, Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, Lotze, Wundt, Paulsen, the materialists Ludwig Feuerbach, Moleschott, and Büchner, not to mention many less noted writers, and, so far as it affects the ethical relations of man to the lower animals, is elucidated and confirmed by the newest developments of biology and zoology, which began with the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. With the disappearance of the crude hypothesis of special creations from the domain of natural history, the anthropocentric conception of the universe has ceased to be tenable and has been abandoned by the majority of scholars in every field of investigation, including even the best thinkers in the province of theology."--Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology (1897) by E. P. Evans

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Animal rights, also known as animal liberation, is the idea that the most basic interests of animals should be afforded the same consideration as the similar interests of human beings.

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