Edward Payson Evans


Edward Payson Evans was an American scholar, linguist, and educator. His work combined philology, literary history, and moral philosophy. Educated at the University of Michigan, he taught modern languages in the United States before continuing his studies at universities in Germany, where he spent much of his career. Evans wrote on subjects including German literature, comparative linguistics, and the ethical status of animals. His best-known book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, examined historical records of animal trials in Europe. Earlier, in Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology, he explored the implications of evolutionary theory for moral philosophy and animal consciousness. His writings have since been discussed in relation to the development of animal ethics and studies of human–animal relationships.

Biography

Evans was born in Remsen, New York, in 1831. His father was the Reverend Evan Evans, a Welsh Presbyterian clergyman. Evans earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan in 1854. He then taught at an academy in Hernando, Mississippi, in 1855, before becoming a professor at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin from 1856 to 1857.
From 1858 to 1862, he traveled abroad, studying at the universities of Göttingen, Berlin and Munich. On his return to the United States, he became professor of modern languages at the University of Michigan. In 1868, he married Elizabeth Edson Gibson, and in 1870, Evans resigned his position at Michigan to travel abroad again, where he gathered materials for a history of German literature, and made a specialty of studying oriental languages.
While living in Munich, he became a fixture at the Royal Library of Munich, and joined the staff of the political journal Allgemeine Zeitung in 1884. Evans' wife died in 1911 and when the First World War broke out in 1914, he returned to the United States, where he lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City.
Evans died at his home in New York City, on March 6, 1917.

Legacy

Evans' 1906 book The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, is considered to be the seminal work on the topic of animal trials. In recent years the book has been the subject of several critiques.
Environmental historian Roderick Nash argues that both Evans and J. Howard Moore, "deserve more recognition than they have received as the first professional philosophers in the United States to look beyond anthropocentrism." Bernard E. Rollin has cited Evans' 1907 book Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology as an example of contemporaries of Darwin who used his Darwin's [theory of evolution|theory of evolution] to advocate for the ethical treatment of animals.

Selected works

Articles