Philosophical ethology draws heavily upon the methods and findings of ethological traditions but must be a properly philosophical undertaking that reframes them in terms of critical and speculative questions about animal mind and animal subjectivity. Both traditional ethology and later cognitive ethology failed to call into question the dualistic Cartesian ontological paradigm that introduced and justified an unbridgeable divide between human and nonhuman animals. Following the implications of Darwinian evolution and immanentist ontological philosophy, philosophical (...) ethology presents a model of animal subjectivity and desire that encompasses nonhuman and human animals. Martin Heidegger was correct in his phenomenological description of being-in-the-world, but he erred badly in failing to extend this model to other animals. Relationships to temporality and desire indicate that subjectivity is widespread among animals. (shrink)

Dominique Lestel is a French philosopher whose work is significant for the rethinking of animality and human-animal relations. Throughout such important books as _L’Animalité _, _Les Origines animales de la culture _ and _L’Animal singulier_, he offers a fierce critique of reductive, mechanistic models of animal behaviour, as well as a positive contribution to etho-ethnographic and phenomenological methods for understanding animal life. Centred around hybrid human–animal communities of shared interests, affects and meaning, his critical and speculative approach to the animal (...) sciences offers a vision of animals as acting subjects and bearers of culture, who form their own worlds and transform them in concert with human and other partners. In tracing the ways in which we share our lives with animals in the texture of animality, Lestel’s cutting-edge philosophical ethology also contributes to an overarching philosophical anthropology of the human as the most animal of animals. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. _. (shrink)

Roberto Marchesini is an Italian philosopher and ethologist whose work is significant for the rethinking of animality and human–animal relations. Throughout such important books as _Il dio Pan_, _Il concetto di soglia_, _Post-human_, _Intelligenze plurime_, _Epifania animale_, and _Etologia filosofica_, he offers a scathing critique of reductive, mechanistic models of animal behaviour, as well as a positive contribution to zooanthropological and phenomenological methods for understanding animal life. Centred on the dynamic and performative field of interactions and relations in the world, (...) his critical and speculative approach to the cognitive life sciences offers a vision of animals as acting subjects and bearers of culture, whose action and agency is also indispensable to human culture. In tracing the ways in which we share our lives and histories with animals in different contexts of interaction, Marchesini’s cutting-edge philosophical ethology also contributes to an overarching philosophical anthropology of the human as the animal that most requires the present and input of other animals. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. _. (shrink)

Central to the work of Roberto Marchesini is a sustained critical engagement with the sciences of animal behavior. Drawing on veterinary, biological, and philosophical training, he critiques the legacy of Cartesianism that sees animals as machines at the same time as acknowledging the importance of biological knowledge and approaches for understanding animals. Further, he offers his own version of a zooanthropological and posthumanist method for the future of ethology as an interdisciplinary social science founded on shared existence, interaction, (...) and understanding. His reframing of questions around biological and cultural continuity in turn refigures received notions of identity, animality, and the origin of culture itself. (shrink)

Central to the work of Dominique Lestel is a sustained critical engagement with the sciences of animal behaviour. He critiques the legacy of Cartesianism that sees animals as machines, at the same time as acknowledging the revolution in the understanding of animals that took place in twentieth-century ethology. Further, he offers his own methodological proposals for the future of ethology as a fully social science founded on shared existence and understanding. This profusion of new evidence and edifying approaches (...) demands that we rethink our ideas both of animality and of the nature and origins of culture. (shrink)

Answers to the question, “What is a farm animal?” often revolve around genetics, physical attributes, and the animals’ functions in agricultural production. The essential and defining characteristics of farm animals transcend these limited models, however, and require an answer that avoids reductionism and encompasses a de-atomizing point of view. Such an answer should promote recognition of animals as beings with extensive mental and social capabilities that outline the extent of each individual animal’s existence and—at the same time—define the animals as (...) parts of wholes that in themselves are more than the sum of their parts and have ethological as well as ethical relevance. To accomplish this, the concepts of both anthropomorphism and sociobiology will be examined, and the article will show how the possibility of understanding animals and their characteristics deeply affects both ethology and philosophy; that is, it has an important influence on our descriptive knowledge of animals, the concept of what animal welfare is and can be, and any normative ethics that follow such knowledge. (shrink)

A cross-section of the writings of Dominique Lestel, Vinciane Despret and Roberto Marchesini is presented here in translation across three special issues on philosophical ethology. These thinkers, relatively unknown in anglophone scholarship, offer important contributions to contemporary debates in posthumanism and animal studies. Particularly in so far as they scrutinise our often awkward attempts to understand the behaviour of animals in labs and fields – to know what animal bodies can do – they share in the rethinking of (...) interspecies forms of life, as domains of both empirical knowledge and zoo-political performance, and thereby take important steps towards a new philosophical ethology. (shrink)

:Recent attempts to engage and develop modes of ethological practice that avoid deterministic and mechanistic accounts of animal action have often relied on affect as a way of articulating how animal bodies affect and are in turn affected by the animate and inanimate bodies around them. In this context affect has often functioned as an instigating site of change that opens up the experience of a particular animal to new possibilities for action and relation. This paper seeks to bring the (...) significant role that affect has played in opening up new directions in ethological theory and practice in contact with a discussion of two currents in affect theory – one shaped by the genealogy of philosophical thought that stretches from Spinoza, through Gilles Deleuze, to contemporary thinkers such as Brian Massumi, and the other emerging from the reception of the American psychologist and cybernetics thinker Silvan Tomkins, in the context of queer theory, through the work of Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank. The locus of intersection for these different modes of theoretical practice is the site-specific case study of monk parakeets who have drawn on and incorporated the ornamental elaborations of human architecture into their own complex architectural nest constructions at Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. (shrink)

Although best known as a philosopher and political theorist, John Stuart Mill made important contributions to psychology as well. In this he followed his father, James Mill, whose two‐volume Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829) relied upon and updated the “associationist” research program initiated by John Locke and further developed by Dr. David Hartley and David Hume, among others. The Mills pere et fils shared an abiding interest in how human character is formed (and too often deformed) (...) along associationist lines. The elder Mill couched this in “educational” terms, and his son in “ethological” ones. J.S. Mill's new science of Ethology, or character‐formation differed in important respects from his father's theory. The most significant of these was that James Mill held that an individual can play no part in the formation of his own character, while his son disagreed vehemently. Here I trace the sources and implications of this disagreement. (shrink)

v. 1. The history of philosophy and science from ancient times to the present day -- v. 2. The origin of the mental capacities and dispositions of man and their normal, abnormal and supernormal manifestations.

Cognitive ethology cannot be done well unless its proximate philosophical underpinnings are got straight; this paper tries to help with that. Cognitive attributions are essentially explanatory—if they did not explain behavior, there would be no justification for them—but it doesn’t follow that they explain by providing causes for events that don’t have physical causes. To understand how mentalistic attributions do work, we need to focus on the quartet: sensory input, belief, desire, and behavioral output. We also need to (...) be able to study classes of sensory inputs—one-shot deals are uninterpretable. The crucial guiding rule is, roughly: The animal’s behavior shouldn’t be explained by attributing to it the belief that P unless the behavior occurs in sensory circumstances belonging to a class whose members are marked off in some way that involves the concept of P and not in any way that is lower than that. The higher/lower distinction can be understood so that the guiding rule is helpful not only in deciding what thoughts to attribute to an animal but also in deciding whether to attribute any thoughts at all. (shrink)

Our goal in this paper is to provide enough of an account of the origins of cognitive ethology and the controversy surrounding it to help ethicists to gauge for themselves how to balance skepticism and credulity about animal minds when communicating with scientists. We believe that ethicists’ arguments would benefit from better understanding of the historical roots of ongoing controversies. It is not appropriate to treat some widely reported results in animal cognition as if their interpretations are a matter (...) of scientific consensus. It is especially important to understand why loose references to “cognitive ethology” by philosophers can signal ignorance of the field to scientists who are more deeply immersed in the relevant literature. Understanding the variety of approaches to cognitive phenomena in animals is essential if such capacities are to form the foundation of scientifically-informed ethical reasoning about animals. (shrink)

Throughout much of his career, Deleuze repeats a problem he attributes to Spinoza: “we do not even know what a body can do.” The problem is closely associated with Deleuze’s parallelist reading of Spinoza and what he calls ethology. In this article, I argue that Deleuze takes ethology to be a new model for philosophy which he intends to replace ontology. I ground my claim in Deleuze’s suggestion that Spinoza offers philosophers the means of thinking “with AND rather (...) than thinking for IS...” The argument is developed through Deleuze’s monographs and collaborations on Spinoza and alongside his meta-philosophical critique of the Image of Thought. -/- A travers la plupart de sa carrière, Deleuze répète un problème qu'il attribue à Spinoza : « on ne sait même pas ce que peut le corps. » Le problème est étroitement lié à paralléliste lecture de Spinoza par Deleuze et à ce qu’il appelle éthologie. Dans cet article, je soutiens que Deleuze prend éthologie être un nouveau modèle de philosophie qu’il entend remplacer l’ontologie. Je centre mon contention sur la suggestion de Deleuze que Spinoza propose des philosophes les moyens de « penser avec ET au lieu de penser pour EST… » L’argument est développé à travers les monographies et collaborations de Deleuze sur Spinoza et aux côtés de sa critique méta-philosophique de l’Image de la Pensée. (shrink)

In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari muse on that time of life when a philosopher feels compelled to reflect upon the question of the nature of her or his practice. The desire for such reflection, they argue, comes with age. It involves self-reflection, something that concerns one's disposition, and one's place in the world. As such it is properly an ethical process. The idea of reflection, however, is also fundamental to both thought itself and to artistic practice, or the (...) practice of creation. In considering the nature of philosophy, then, Deleuze and Guattari turn, through logical necessity, to the nature of thought and the thought of nature: that is, they also consider science, and art. This chapter argues that this interrelation is at the heart of their understanding of natural being, and links up with the minor traditions of thinking that they trace and extend in their own work. Yet the connection between art and how we should live also occurs in the dominant tradition of thought: rather than ethics, however, this tradition links artistic practice to morals, and the ‘moral’. There are a number of distinctions, then, which involve not so much binary oppositions as differences of perspective, and these are crucial to an understanding of the interrelations Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari develop between art, ethics, and ethology. These distinctions assert an ethics over a morality; thought over consciousness; creation over mimesis. (shrink)

I n my argument in this paper I shall assume rather than try to prove the proposition, surely not on the face of it an unreasonable one, that the question of what actions, dispositions and circumstances are such as to frustrate human beings, and what are such as to make them comparatively happy and fulfilled, has a great deal of bearing on the question of what actions and dispositions are good or bad. I shall also assume that the way in (...) which human persons or societies can achieve fulfilment, or fail to achieve it, is explicable largely on the basis of the way in which man as a species has evolved. Few people, except those strongly affected by philosophical fashion, will wish to deny the first of these propositions. What one might call the hard utilitarian thesis, that goodness is to be defined in terms of contribution to happiness or fulfilment, may involve the ‘naturalistic fallacy’, may be vulnerable to the arguments of Moore, Hare and others. But I shall not commit myself here to the hard utilitarian thesis, since I am not insisting that goodness may be defined in terms of contribution to human happiness or fulfilment, but only that the question of how far anything contributes to human happiness or fulfilment has a vital bearing on the question of whether and to what extent it is good. I do not think that many people really doubt the truth of this proposition, unless they confuse it with the hard utilitarian thesis. (shrink)

The heart of this book is the reciprocal relationship between philosophical theories of mind and empirical studies of animal cognition.

The apparent incompatibility of mental states with physical explanations has long been a concern of philosophers of psychology. This incompatibility is thought to arise from the intentionality of mental states. But, Brentano notwithstanding, intentionality is an ordinary feature of higher order behavior patterns in the classical literature of ethology.

It has been argued that if an animal is psychologically like us, there may be more scientific reason to experiment upon it, but less moral justification to do so. Some scientists deny the existence of this dilemma, claiming that although there are scientifically valuable similarities between humans and animals that make experimentation worthwhile, humans are at the same time unique and fundamentally different. This latter response is, ironically, typical of pre-Darwinian beliefs in the relationship between human and non-human animals. Another (...) irony is that debate about such issues has facilitated the participation once more of philosophers in questions concerning experimental psychology: ironic because laboratory-oriented psychologists, especially since the turn of the last century, had been eager to establish the independence of their subject from any influence of philosophy and its investigative methods, as well as from any kind of anthropomorphism.In Britain, certainly more so than in the United States, ethical constraints have prevented the development of psychological research with animals along certain routes. By the 1980s British professional and academic societies had published codes of conduct and guidelines for their members, in part responding to public concern about the welfare of animals in the psychological laboratory. What led to the establishment of these codes and guidelines? This paper analyses the historical background against which professional concern for ethical cost in experimental animal psychology began to take shape, leading to the societies' open pronouncements of the 1980s. (shrink)

It has been argued that if an animal is psychologically like us, there may be more scientific reason to experiment upon it, but less moral justification to do so. Some scientists deny the existence of this dilemma, claiming that although there are scientifically valuable similarities between humans and animals that make experimentation worthwhile, humans are at the same time unique and fundamentally different. This latter response is, ironically, typical of pre-Darwinian beliefs in the relationship between human and non-human animals. Another (...) irony is that debate about such issues has facilitated the participation once more of philosophers in questions concerning experimental psychology: ironic because laboratory-oriented psychologists, especially since the turn of the last century, had been eager to establish the independence of their subject from any influence of philosophy and its investigative methods, as well as from any kind of anthropomorphism.In Britain, certainly more so than in the United States, ethical constraints have prevented the development of psychological research with animals along certain routes. By the 1980s British professional and academic societies had published codes of conduct and guidelines for their members, in part responding to public concern about the welfare of animals in the psychological laboratory. What led to the establishment of these codes and guidelines? This paper analyses the historical background against which professional concern for ethical cost in experimental animal psychology began to take shape, leading to the societies’ open pronouncements of the 1980s. (shrink)

This paper explores Kornblith's proposal in "Knowledge and its Place in Nature" that knowledge is a natural kind that can be elucidated and understood in scientific terms. Central to Kornblith's development of this proposal is the claim that there is a single category of unreflective knowledge that is studied by cognitive ethologists and is the proper province of epistemology. This claim is challenged on the grounds that even unreflective knowledge in language-using humans reflects forms of logical reasoning that are in (...) principle unavailable to nonlinguistic animals. (shrink)

To establish a starting point for a phenomenological theory of the science of primate ethology, this essay first reviews how the phenomenological philosophers Aron Gurwitsch and Maurice Merleau-Ponty made use of the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler’s description of chimpanzee consciousness and its objects and then considers primate ethology in light of the theory of the cultural sciences in the work of Gurwitsch in addition to that of Alfred Schutz.

What is the distribution of cognitive ability within the animal kingdom? It would be egalitarian to assume that variation in intelligence is everywhere clinal, but examining trends among major phylogenetic groups, it becomes easy to distinguish high-performing ‘generalists’ – whose behavior exhibits domain-flexibility – from ‘specialists’ whose range of behavior is limited and ecologically specific. These generalists include mammals, birds, and, intriguingly, cephalopods. The apparent intelligence of coleoid cephalopods (squids, octopuses, and cuttlefish) is surprising – and philosophically relevant – because (...) of our independent evolutionary lineages: the most recent common ancestor between vertebrates and cephalopods would have been a small wormlike organism, without any major organizational structure to its nervous system. By identifying the cognitive similarities between these organisms and vertebrates, we can begin to derive some general principles of intelligence as a biological phenomenon. Here, I discuss trends in cephalopod behavior and surrounding theory, and suggest their significance for our understanding of domain-general cognition and its evolution. (shrink)

We spend a lot of time thinking about other people: their motivations, what they are thinking, why they want particular things. Sometimes we are aware of it, but it often occurs without conscious thought, and we can respond appropriately to other people's thoughts in a diverse range of situations. The Social Mind: A Philosophical Introduction examines the cognitive capacities that facilitate this amazing ability. It explains and critiques key philosophical theories about how we think about other people's minds, (...) measuring them against empirical findings from neuroscience, anthropology, developmental psychology and cognitive ethology. Some of the fascinating questions addressed include: How do we think about other people's minds? Do we put ourselves in another's shoes to work out what they think? When do we need to think about another person's thoughts? What kinds of thoughts do we attribute to others? Are they propositional attitudes like beliefs and desires as analytic philosophers have often assumed, or could they be something else? What sorts of neural mechanisms underlie our ability to think about other people's thoughts? How is the ability to think about other minds different for individuals on the autism Spectrum? Is a preoccupation with other people's thoughts a Western phenomenon or is it found in all cultures? How do children learn to think about other minds? Can non-human animals think about other minds? These questions are applied to case studies throughout the book, including mirror neurons, recent research on infant social cognition, false belief tasks, and cross-cultural studies. Covering complex interdisciplinary debates in an accessible and clear way, with chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary, The Social Mind: A Philosophical Introduction is an ideal entry point into this fast-moving and exciting field. It is essential reading for students of philosophy of mind and psychology, and also of interest to those in related subjects such as cognitive science, social and developmental psychology, and anthropology. (shrink)

In this review of Allen & Bekoff's Species of Mind, underlying theoretical assumptions of cognitive ethology are examined from a biological and philosophical viewpoint. In particular, the aim of the book to constitute a foundational concept for cognitive ethology is addressed. The ambiguity of theory-of-mind approaches in animal cognition is discussed as a major problem for causal explanations in behavioural biology.

The fifth edition of the Philosophical Dictionary leaves a very favorable impression. It is a useful mass edition. It has been considerably enlarged—by almost one hundred fifty pages compared with the fourth edition. The dictionary now contains many new articles: "Acceleration of socioeconomic development," "The human factor," "The meaning of life," "Discipline," "Social conflict," "Understanding," "Computerization," "Informatics," "Philosophy of science," "The logic of scientific cognition," "Sociobiology," "Egoconception," "Scientific materialism," "Humanity," "Ethology," etc. Many of these terms were previously not (...) found at all in our philosophical reference literature, including the Philosophical Encyclopedia [Filosofskaia entsiklopediia] and the Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary [Filosofskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar']. (shrink)

Drawing on a wide range of texts - from philosophical ethology to classical texts, and from continental philosophy to literature - Cimatti creates a dialogue with Flaubert, Derrida, Temple Grandin, Heidegger as well as Malaparte and Landolfi explores what human animality looks like, with a particular focus on the work of Gilles Deleuze.

This article shows that the question of “Historical Thinking and the Human” demands expanding the field of the philosophy of history. What I propose is to investigate the issue from two perspectives: firstly, by positioning it in the broader philosophical context, one that increasingly transcends the boundaries of the humanities to enter the realm of the life sciences; and secondly, by drawing on a wider range of analytical material than has usually been the case in classic works in the (...) philosophy of history. I will critically reflect upon history’s anthropocentric biases, highlighting the need to develop an alternative to history. My thinking is aligned, on the one hand, with notions of the agency of images that have emerged from art criticism and visual culture studies, and, on the other hand, with the idea of theriomorphism, which I explore in terms of new animism, new totemism and philosophical ethology. In my analysis of works by the South African artist Nandipha Mntambo, I argue that a future-oriented redefinition of the human should transcend the limited categories that have emerged within the framework of history understood as a Eurocentric approach to the past rooted in Greco-Judaic-Christian tradition. (shrink)

This interview ranges across a number of topics relevant to Roberto Marchesini’s thought: the history and philosophy of ethology and entomology; zooanthropology and animal culture; philosophical ethology and philosophical anthropology; animal studies; and animals in laboratories, in the field, on farms, and in household/urban settings. It touches on thinkers including Margherita Hack, Giorgio Celli, Donna Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Charles Darwin, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

Roberto Marchesini is an Italian philosopher and ethologist whose work is significant for the rethinking of animality and human–animal relations. Throughout such important books as Il dio Pan,Il concetto di soglia, Post-human, Intelligenze plurime, Epifania animale, and Etologia filosofica he offers a scathing critique of reductive, mechanistic models of animal behaviour, as well as a positive contribution to zooanthropological and phenomenological methods for understanding animal life. Centred on the dynamic and performative field of interactions and relations in the world, his (...) critical and speculative approach to the cognitive life sciences offers a vision of animals as acting subjects and bearers of culture, whose action and agency is also indispensable to human culture. In tracing the ways in which we share our lives and histories with animals in different contexts of interaction, Marchesini's cutting-edge philosophical ethology also contributes to an overarching philosophical anthropology of the human as the animal that most requires the presence and input of other animals. (shrink)

Can animals act morally? Philosophical tradition answers 'no,' and has apparently convincing arguments on its side. Cognitive ethology supplies a growing body of empirical evidence that suggests these arguments are wrong. This groundbreaking book assimilates both philosophical and ethological frameworks into a unified whole and argues for a qualified 'yes.'.

This essay provides a theoretical and methodological introduction to the writings of Vinciane Despret. Over the last twenty years Despret has contributed a significant number of books and articles in the fields of philosophical ethology and animal studies, and throughout them all Despret's methodological approach resists easy explanation. There is no single, uni- versal method applicable to all animals, in every situation; instead, Despret responds with an open curiosity to the plurality of animal worlds and the storied versions (...) about them. She studies and works with animals just as much as with scientists, farmers, and conserva- tionists. Taking joy in the diversity of animal behaviour, she creates conditions that allow animals to be interesting, and finds humour, warmth, and care in the stories that they tell. Through the practices of human–animal relations Despret contends that humans are transformed, in their thought just as much as in their practices, as much as animals are transformed. This ess.. (shrink)

Dominique Lestel is a French philosopher whose work is significant for the rethinking of animality and human–animal relations. Throughout such important books as L'Animalite? , Les Origines animales de la culture and L'Animal singulier , he offers a scathing critique of reductive, mechanistic models of animal behaviour, as well as a positive contribution to etho-ethnographic and phenomenological methods for understanding animal life. Centred around hybrid human–animal communities of shared interests, affects and meaning, his critical and speculative approach to the animal (...) sciences offers a vision of animals as acting subjects and bearers of culture, who form their own worlds and transform them in concert with human and other partners. In tracing the ways in which we share our lives with animals in the texture of animality, Lestel's cutting-edge philosophical ethology also contributes to an overarching philosophical anthropology of the human as the most animal of animals. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally assumed that the difference between active and passive movement could be explained by the presence or absence of an intention in the mind of the agent. This assumption has led to the neglect of many interesting active behaviors that do not depend on intentions, including the "mindless" actions of humans and the activities of non-human animals. In this book Jones offers a broad account of agency that unifies these cases. The book addresses a range of questions, including: (...) When are movements properly attributed to whole agents, rather than to their parts? What does it mean for an agent to guide its action? What distinguishes agents from other complex systems? What is the relationship between action and adaptive behavior? And why might the study of living systems be the key to understanding agency? This book makes an important contribution to current philosophical debate on the nature and origins of agency. It defines action as a uniquely biological process and recasts human intentional action as a specialized case of a broader and more common phenomenon than has been previously assumed. Uniting findings from philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, biology, computer science, complexity theory and ethology, this book will be of interest to students and scholars working in these areas. (shrink)

Typically in the philosophical literature, kinds of minds are differentiated by the range of cognitive tasks animals accomplish as opposed to the means by which they accomplish the tasks. Drawing on progress in cognitive ethology (the study of animal cognition), I argue that such an approach provides bad directions for uncovering the mark of the human mind. If the goal is to determine what makes the human mind unique, philosophers should focus on the means by which animals interact (...) with objects in their environments, and not on the sorts of tasks they are able to accomplish. (shrink)

While philosophers have been interested in animals since ancient times, in the last few decades the subject of animal minds has emerged as a major topic in philosophy. _The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds_ is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising nearly fifty chapters by a team of international contributors, the _Handbook_ is divided into eight parts: Mental representation Reasoning and (...) metacognition Consciousness Mindreading Communication Social cognition and culture Association, simplicity, and modeling Ethics. Within these sections central issues, debates and problems are examined, including: whether and how animals represent and reason about the world; how animal cognition differs from human cognition; whether animals are conscious; whether animals represent their own mental states or those of others; how animals communicate; the extent to which animals have cultures; how to choose among competing models and explanations of animal behavior; and whether animals are moral agents and/or moral patients; The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, ethics and related disciplines such as ethology, biology, psychology, linguistics and anthropology. (shrink)

In ‘Forgiveness, an Ordered Pluralism’, Fricker distinguishes two concepts of forgiveness, both of which are deployed in our forgiveness practices: moral justice forgiveness and gifted forgiveness. She then argues that the former is more explanatorily basic than the latter. We think Fricker is right about this. We will argue, however, that contra Fricker, it is a third more minimal concept that is most basic. Like Fricker, we will focus on the function of our practices, but in a way that is (...) informed by research in ethology (research which seeks to explain the function of animal behaviour and determine how these behaviours evolved). (shrink)

Ethological theories usually attribute semantic content to animal signals. To account for this fact, many biologists and philosophers appeal to some version of teleosemantics. However, this picture has recently came under attack: while mainstream teleosemantics assumes that representational systems must cooperate, some biologists and philosophers argue that in certain cases signaling can evolve within systems lacking common interest. In this paper I defend the standard view from this objection.

In the current debates about zoosemiotics its relations with the neighbouring disciplines are a relevant topic. The present article aims to analyse the complex relations between zoosemiotics and cognitive ethology with special attention to their establishers: Thomas A. Sebeok and Donald R. Griffin. It is argued that zoosemiotics and cognitive ethology have common roots in comparative studies of animal communication in the early 1960s. For supporting this claim Sebeok’s works are analysed, the classical and philosophical periods of (...) his zoosemiotic views are distinguished and the changing relations between zoosemiotics and cognitive ethology are described. The animal language controversy can be interpreted as the explicit point of divergence of the two paradigms, which, however, is a mere symptom of a deeper cleavage. The analysis brings out later critical differences between Sebeok’s and Griffin’s views on animal cognition and language. This disagreement has been the main reason for the critical reception and later neglect of Sebeok’s works in cognitive ethology. Sebeok’s position in this debate remains, however, paradigmatic, i.e. it proceeds from understanding of the contextualisation of semiotic processes that do not allow treating the animal mind as a distinct entity. As a peculiar parallel to Griffin’s metaphor of “animal mind”, Sebeok develops his understanding of “semiotic self” as a layered structure, characterised by an ability to make distinctions, foremost between itself and the surrounding environment. It appears that the history of zoosemiotics has two layers: in addition to the chronological history starting in 1963, when Sebeok proposed a name for the field, zoosemiotics is also philosophically rooted in Peircean semiotics and German biological philosophy. It is argued that the confrontation between zoosemiotics and cognitive ethology is related to different epistemological approaches and at least partly induced by underlying philosophical traditions. (shrink)

Historians of science have only just begun to sample the wealth of different approaches to the study of animal behavior undertaken in the twentieth century. To date, more attention has been given to Lorenzian ethology and American behaviorism than to other work and traditions, but different approaches are equally worthy of the historian's attention, reflecting not only the broader range of questions that could be asked about animal behavior and the "animal mind" but also the different contexts in which (...) these questions were important. One such approach is that represented by the work of the French zoologist Louis Boutan (1859-1934). This paper explores the intellectual and cultural history of Boutan's work on animal language and the animal mind, and contextualizes the place of animal behavior studies within late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French biology. I explore the ways in which Boutan addressed the philosophical issue of whether language was necessary for abstract thought and show how he shifted from the idea that animals were endowed with a purely affective language to the notion that of they were capable of "rudimentary" reasoning. I argue that the scientific and broader socio-cultural contexts in which Boutan operated played a role in this transition. Then I show how Boutan's linguistic and psychological experiments with a gibbon and children provide insights into his conception of "naturalness." Although Boutan reared his gibbon at home and studied it in the controlled environment of his laboratory, he continued to identify its behavior as "natural." I specifically demonstrate the importance of the milieu of the French Third Republic in shaping Boutan's understanding not only of animal intelligence and child education, but also his definition of nature. Finally, I argue that Boutan's studies on the primate mind provide us with a lens through which we can examine the co-invention of animal and child psychology in early-twentieth-century France. (shrink)

ABSTRACT When a philosopher and a dog play Frisbee, do they cognize the same Frisbee? Is Fido subject to the “myth of the given”? The questions are not silly, for as Marjorie Grene quipped, “Epistemology is a branch of ethology.” What follows accepts what is usually called a “correspondence” theory of truth and a “realist” account of human knowledge. Nothing new, but what will be distinctive is that it seeks to exploit an unusual naturalism deriving from the American (...) class='Hi'>philosophical tradition. It will particularly address the epistemic relation of sensing to knowing. A currently widespread view among those who object to realism can be traced to Wilfrid Sellars's 1956 critique of the “myth of the given.” Sellars argued that the normative “order of reasons” in which beliefs are adjudicated is discontinuous with the causal order of sensation or perception, so the former cannot be grounded in the latter. My claim will be that Sellars was half wrong, and the wrong half can be addressed by contemporary cognitive science and anthropology. The permission to employ the latter is granted by a special version of naturalism, “ordinal naturalism,” formed from the American philosophical tradition. (shrink)

The second edition of this exceptional anthology provides an introduction to a wide variety of views on human nature. Drawing from diverse cultures over three millennia, Leslie Stevenson has chosen selections ranging from ancient religious texts to contemporary theories based on evolutionary science. An ideal companion to the editor's recent book, Ten Theories of Human Nature, 3/e (OUP, 1998), this interdisciplinary reader can also be used independently. The Study of Human Nature, 2/e offers substantial selections illustrating the ten perspectives discussed (...) in Ten Theories of Human Nature, 3/e--The Bible, Hinduism, Confucianism, Plato, Kant, Marx, Freud, Sartre, B.F. Skinner's behaviorism, and Konrad Lorenz's ethological diagnosis of human aggression. The Islamic tradition is represented by a selection from the 20th-century Iranian philosopher Ayatullah Murtaza Mutahhari. The 17th- and 18th-century philosophers Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant are also represented. Selections from Rousseau, J.S. Mill, and Nancy Holmstrom discuss alleged differences between women and men, and a paper by Henry Bracken deals with racial issues. Examples from E.O. Wilson's sociobiology and his critics are also included, together with material from Chomsky and from recent evolutionary psychology. This new edition includes more substantial selections from the Hindu, Confucian, and Christian traditions and provides more accessible extracts from Marx, Sartre, and Lorenz. An excellent reader for introductory courses in philosophy, religious studies, human nature, and intellectual history, The Study of Human Nature, 2/e, is also an essential resource for anyone interested in ancient, modern, and contemporary perspectives on human nature. (shrink)

In recent years both philosophers and scientists have been sceptical about the existence of animal minds. This is in distinction to Hume who claimed that '...no truth appears to me more evident, than that beasts are endow'd with thought and reason as well as men'. I argue that Hume is correct about the epistemological salience of our ordinary practices of ascribing mental states to animals. The reluctance of contemporary philosophers and scientists to embrace the view that animals have minds is (...) primarily a fact about their philosophy and science rather than a fact about animals. The recognition of this fact is the beginning of any serious effort to develop a science of cognitive ethology. (shrink)

Noting that the ethological notion of «making special» (now also called «artification») has gained attention in several fields, including aesthetic philosophy, a brief history is presented of its origin and development over forty years. Its origin is traced to «proto-aesthetic» elements of interactions that evolved in Middle Pleistocene mothers and infants: simplification or formalization, repetition, exaggeration, elaboration, and manipulation of expectation. These operations upon visual, vocal, and gestural modalities were subsequently used by individuals and cultures in creating and responding to (...) their various arts. Artification is a broader human proclivity than «art». Unlike other notions of art it does not imply beauty or skill although in its motivation to mark importance, the ordinary is made extraordinary. In its emphasis on preverbal, presymbolic, pancultural, participative, affective, and affinitive aspects of aesthetic cognition and behavior, the artification hypothesis provides further directions to cognitivist and neuroscientific studies in contemporary philosophical aesthetics. (shrink)

The explanation of animal communication by means of concepts like information, meaning and reference is one of the central foundational issues in animal behaviour studies. This book explores these issues, revolving around questions such as: • What is the nature of information? • What theoretical roles does information play in animal communication studies? • Is it justified to employ these concepts in order to explain animal communication? • What is the relation between animal signals and human language? The book approaches (...) the topic from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including ethology, animal cognition, theoretical biology and evolutionary biology, as well as philosophy of biology and mind. A comprehensive introduction familiarises non-specialists with the field and leads on to chapters ranging from philosophical and theoretical analyses to case studies involving primates, birds and insects. The resulting survey of new and established concepts and methodologies will guide future empirical and theoretical research. (shrink)

This collection of essays serves both as an introduction to Ruth Millikan’s much-discussed volume Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories and as an extension and application of Millikan’s central themes, especially in the philosophy of psychology. The title essay discusses meaning rationalism and argues that rationality is not in the head, indeed, that there is no legitimate interpretation under which logical possibility and necessity are known a priori. In other essays, Millikan clarifies her views on the nature of mental representation, (...) explores whether human thought is a product of natural selection, examines the nature of behavior as studied by the behavioral sciences, and discusses the issues of individualism in psychology, psychological explanation, indexicality in thought, what knowledge is, and the realism/antirealism debate. Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1 In Defense of Proper Functions 2 Propensities, Exaptations, and the Brain 3 Thoughts without Laws 4 Biosemantics 5 On Mentalese Orthography, Part 1 6 Compare and Contrast Dretske, Fodor, and Millikan on Teleosemantics 7 What Is Behavior? A Philosophical Essay on Ethology and Individualism in Psychology, Part 1 8 The Green Grass Growing All Around: A Philosophical Essay on Ethology and Individualism in Psychology, Part 2 9 Explanation in Biopsychology 10 Metaphysical Antirealism? 11 Truth Rules, Hoverflies, and the Kripke-Wittgenstein Paradox 12 Naturalist Reflections on Knowledge 13 The Myth of the Essential Indexical 14 White Queen Psychology; or, The Last Myth of the Given References Index. (shrink)