Christa Hodapp
PhD Student
By Leah Bayens
Photos by Mark Cornelison
Philosophy doctoral candidate Christa Hodapp is sorting out an issue most people superficially acknowledge before returning to business as usual: humans are animals.
“The traditional, neo-Lockean claim is that you’re fundamentally a person, which is a rational, thinking being, and you happen to be related to an animal in some way,” Hodapp explained. Thus, many people imagine that personhood separates us from the likes of dogs, horses, and ants. In the process, they also tend to place humans on a higher rung than our nonhuman counterparts.
Hodapp, however, refuses to split nature and mind in this way. Instead, her dissertation, Personal Identity and the Biological View of Human Persistence, foregrounds the notion that human beings are not simply related