Sartre at least considered that animals might possess partial consciousness

Evidence

Sartre rarely grants other animals the compliment of recognising their forms of consciousness. Until now he had implicitly set them all in the realm of the ‘in-itself’ along with trees and slabs of concrete. But now it seems his view has shifted. Animals may not be fully conscious — but perhaps humans are not either, and this may be what Sartre means by taking us to the border of dreams. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 709

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Levinas’s prison-camp dog episode (which the paragraph gestures at) and the broader existentialist question of whether consciousness is unique to humans.
• SEED: Angle: the gaze cuts both ways — what happens when an animal looks back at the philosophizing human? Could anchor a piece on the animal turn in existentialism vs. Levinas’s ethics.