(2013). Animal Thinking: Contemporary Issues in Comparative Cognition. Philosophical Psychology. ???aop.label???. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2012.732339.

Examines the findings of scientific research into the thought processes of animals and argues that animals are capable of conscious thought.

Resumo: No contexto da “era da leitura de imagens”, a animação também é um produto moderno, e a animação chinesa sempre foi uma “transmissão de imagens por meio de imagens”. Os autores acostumaram-se a pegar emprestado desenhos animados de países, como o Japão ou países europeus, e sua criatividade no pensamento de animação foi bastante suprimida, o que é um golpe devastador. Ao rastrear a origem do pensamento de animação, a partir de uma perspectiva filosófica, a evolução do pensamento e (...) da expressão humana pode ser mais bem compreendida. Isso ajuda os pesquisadores a entender a evolução e as inovações da cultura humana e, assim, perceber melhor a relação entre cultura, arte e filosofia. O pensamento objetal enfatiza a divisão de problemas complexos em componentes menores, ou seja, os objetos. Na animação, isso pode ser interpretado como a divisão de cenas e ações complexas em objetos, personagens e elementos separados. Essa abstração e correlação de objetos ajudam os animadores a entender e projetar melhor as interações entre os personagens, o movimento dos objetos e a dinâmica da animação geral. Embora o estudo do “pensamento Xiang” tenha se desenvolvido na história da filosofia, ele não está diretamente relacionado ao rastreamento do pensamento de animação e à reconstrução artística. De fato, ele tem um impacto significativo no pensamento da animação. Por meio da análise do texto filosófico das obras de animação, os pesquisadores podem descobrir os temas filosóficos, os símbolos e os significados da animação. Isso pode incluir a interpretação de um trabalho de animação específico e como determinados pensamentos filosóficos são expressos, por meio da narrativa, dos personagens, dos elementos visuais etc. Portanto, o estudo do pensamento objetal tem um significado prático importante, para explicar a singularidade do pensamento de animação. Um dos objetivos da pesquisa pode ser descobrir a intertextualidade entre animação e filosofia, o que inclui explorar como os escritos e pensamentos filosóficos são representados na animação e, consequentemente, como a animação afeta o pensamento filosófico. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 9, Page 30-32, September 2012.

Realists about animal cognition confront a puzzle. If animals have real, contentful cognitive states, why can’t anyone say precisely what the contents of those states are? I consider several possible resolutions to this puzzle that are open to realists, and argue that the best of these is likely to appeal to differences in the format of animal cognition and human language.

The present article explores the views of al-Jāḥiẓ, Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī - three pre-modern thinkers of the Islamic world outside the Peripatetic tradition - on the question o...

Poststructuralism and Whiteheadian process thought each uniquely dismantle the anthropocentric hierarchies and speciesed constructions we have used to calculate our ethics with non-human bodies. Yet each perspective uniquely continues, despite its own affirmations, to privilege the identity and construction of the human over other bodies. In an effort to move past these shortcomings and into a more creative ethical imagination, this article reads Whiteheadian metaphysics as an affirmation of poststructural singularity, and uses poststructural criticism to deconstruct Whitehead’s subtler form of (...) anthropocentrism. By joining these traditions together, this article makes clear their respective blind spots, moves past the limited and troubled framework of species upheld in each, and advances the truly novel, creaturely relations for which both traditions adamantly call. (shrink)

In Thinking without Words I develop a philosophical framework for treating some animals and human infants as genuine thinkers. This paper outlines the aspects of this account that are most relevant to those working in animal ethics. There is a range of different levels of cognitive sophistication in different animal species, in addition to limits to the types of thought available to non-linguistic creatures, and it may be important for animal ethicists to take this into account (...) in exploring issues of moral significance and the obligations that we might or might not have to non-human animals. (shrink)

How does the human animal who thinks and loves relate to criminal justice? This essay takes up the idea of a moral psychology of guilt promoted by Bernard Williams and Herbert Morris. Against modern liberal society’s ‘peculiar’ legal morality of voluntary responsibility, it pursues Morris’s ethical account of guilt as involving atonement and identification with others. Thinking of guilt in line with Morris, and linking it with the idea of moral psychology, takes the essay to Freud’s metapsychology in (...) Civilization and Its Discontents. Two conflicting routes to guilt are noted in Freud, one involving internalisation of external anger to suppress destructive instincts, the other loving identification with others in the process of self-formation. This second route is developed through the psychoanalytic thought of Hans Loewald and Jonathan Lear. Following Loewald, the moral psychology of self-formation makes loving identification with others the root of responsibility, guilt and atonement. Following Lear, the moral psychology of guilt developed on these lines renders psychoanalysis part of a broadly understood philosophical project following Aristotelian and Socratic principles. Underlying Morris’s account of guilt is the possibility of ‘prospective identification’, understood as the moral and psychological ground of guilt and reconciliation. This is the rational core of criminal justice, which maintains an uneasy relationship with law’s ‘peculiar’ morality. (shrink)

Demenageries, Thinking (of) Animals after Derrida is a collection of essays on animality following Jacques Derrida's work. The Western philosophical tradition separated animals from men by excluding the former from everything that was considered “proper to man”: laughing, suffering, mourning, and above all, thinking. The “animal” has traditionally been considered the absolute Other of humans. This radical otherness has served as the rationale for the domination, exploitation and slaughter of animals. What Derrida called “la pensée de l' (...) class='Hi'>animal” (which means both thinking concerning the animal and “animal thinking”) may help us understand differently such apparently human features as language, thought and writing. It may also help us think anew about such highly philosophical concerns as differences, otherness, the end(s) of history and the world at large. Thanks to the ethical and epistemological crisis of Western humanism, “animality” has become an almost fashionable topic. However,Demenageries is the first collection to take Derrida's thinking on animal thinking as a starting point, a way of reflecting not only on animals but starting from them, in order to address a variety of issues from a vast range of theoretical perspectives: philosophy, literature, cultural theory, anthropology, ethics, politics, religion, feminism, postcolonialism and, of course, posthumanism. (shrink)

There is a thinking animal in your chair and you are the only thinking thing in your chair; therefore, you are an animal. So goes the main argument for animalism, the Thinking Animal Argument. But notice that there are many other things that might do our thinking: heads, brains, upper halves, left-hand complements, right-hand complements, and any other object that has our brain as a part. The abundance of candidates for the things that (...) do our thinking is known as the Thinking Parts Problem. Animalists who endorse the Thinking Animal Argument must solve this problem by giving reasons for privileging the animal over its rivals. In order to meet this challenge, some animalists have argued that the best solution is a biological minimalist one. In what follows, I argue that every extant biological minimalist solution to the Thinking Parts Problem fails. (shrink)

The rapidly expanding field of critical animal studies now offers a myriad of theoretical and philosophical positions from which to choose. This timely book provides an overview and analysis of the most influential of these trends. Approachable and concise, it is intended for readers sympathetic to the project of changing our ways of thinking about and interacting with animals yet relatively new to the variety of philosophical ideas and figures in the discipline. It uses three rubrics—identity, difference, and (...) indistinction—to differentiate three major paths of thought about animals. The identity approach aims to establish continuity among human beings and animals so as to grant animals equal access to the ethical and political community. The difference framework views the animal world as containing its own richly complex and differentiated modes of existence in order to allow for a more expansive ethical and political worldview. The indistinction approach argues that we should abandon the notion that humans are unique in order to explore new ways of conceiving human-animal relations. Each approach is interrogated for its relative strengths and weaknesses, with specific emphasis placed on the kinds of transformational potential it contains. (shrink)

Studies that compare human and animal behaviour suspend prejudices about mind, body and their relation, by approaching thinking in terms of behaviour. Yet comparative approaches typically engage another prejudice, motivated by human social and bodily experience: taking the lone animal as the unit of comparison. This prejudice informs Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s comparative studies, and conceals something important: that animals moving as a group in an environment can develop new sorts of “sense.” The study of animal group-life (...) suggests a new way of thinking about the creation of sense, about the body, the brain, and the relation between thinking and nature. (shrink)

Thinking about Animals in the Age of the Anthropocene makes connections between the Anthropocene discourse and human-animal studies, thus facilitating further interdisciplinary work on the topic of animals in the Anthropocene.

In ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Turing, sceptical of the question ‘Can machines think?’, quickly replaces it with an experimentally verifiable test: the imitation game. I suggest that for such a move to be successful the test needs to be relevant, expansive, solvable by exemplars, unpredictable, and lead to actionable research. The Imitation Game is only partially successful in this regard and its reliance on language, whilst insightful for partially solving the problem, has put AI progress on the wrong foot, prescribing (...) a top-down approach for building thinking machines. I argue that to fix shortcomings with modern AI systems a nonverbal operationalisation is required. This is provided by the recent Animal-AI Testbed, which translates animal cognition tests for AI and provides a bottom-up research pathway for building thinking machines that create predictive models of their environment from sensory input. (shrink)

In his book, Eric Olson (2007) makes some criticisms of a response to the problem of the thinking animal (also called the ‘too many minds’ or ‘too many thinkers’ problem) which I have offered, on behalf of the neo-Lockean psychological continuity theorist. Olson calls my proposal ‘personal pronoun revisionism’ (though I am not suggesting any revision). In what follows I shall say what my proposal actually is, defend it and briefly respond to Olson's criticism.

Julian H. Franklin. Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy. xix + 151 pp., bibl., index. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. $35 .; Lorraine Daston; Gregg Mitman . Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. vi + 230 pp., table, notes, index. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. $49.50 (cloth.

In this paper I reconsider James and Wittgenstein, not in the quest for what Wittgenstein might have learned from James, or for an answer to the question whether Wittgenstein was a pragmatist, but in an effort to see what these and other related but quite different thinkers can help us to see about animals, including ourselves. I follow Cora Diamond’s lead in discussing a late paper by Vicki Hearne entitled “A Taxonomy of Knowing: Animals Captive, Free-Ranging, and at Liberty”, which (...) draws on Wittgenstein and offers some insights that accord with pragmatist accounts of knowledge. (shrink)

According to Eric Olson, the Thinking Animal Argument (TAA) is the best reason to accept animalism, the view that we are identical to animals. A novel criticism has been advanced against TAA, suggesting that it implicitly employs a dubious epistemological principle. I will argue that other epistemological principles can do the trick of saving the TAA, principles that appeal to recent issues regarding disagreement with peers and experts. I conclude with some remarks about the consequence of accepting these (...) modified principles, drawing out some general morals in defending animalism. (shrink)

J. Macgregor Wise and R. van de Vall kindly reviewed my analysis of the potential of webcams on nature conservation sites for developing networks of care. I am indebted to them for their subtle and intelligent deliberation and their valuable suggestions for further elaboration of the project. My focus, as stated in the article, is on the study of users, technology and animals as assemblages, bound together by physical, visual and affective bonds in the process of ‘doing something’.

Many personal identity theorists claim that persons are distinct from the animals that constitute them, but when combined with the plausible assumption that animals share the thoughts of the persons they constitute, this denial results in an excess of thinkers and a host of related problems. I consider a number of non-animalist solutions to these problems and argue that they fail. I argue further that satisfactory non-animalist solutions are not forthcoming and that in order to avoid these problems we ought (...) to affirm our identity with animals. I then discuss arguments to the effect that i) animalism faces its own problems of too many thinkers, arising from the non- identity of animals with thinking bodies and thinking body parts, and ii) that in order to avoid these problems we must deny not just that there are persons distinct from animals, but that there are bodies and body parts distinct from animals Once the second of these claims is granted, there is a short further step to the conclusion that there are no such things as body parts, and from there there is a direct route to eliminative animalism. Eliminative animalism denies not only that there are persons distinct from animals, but that there are any composite objects distinct from animals. This position has been gaining popularity recently, but I argue that we need not, and indeed should not, accept it. Although the problems of the thinking animal do commit us to animalism, the problems of thinking bodies and thinking body parts do not commit us to eliminate animalism. (shrink)

Theological materialism, it is argued, provides an important ethical orientation towards climate change. Following the tradition of practical materialism inaugurated by Karl Marx, materialism is here interpreted in a non-reductive sense that includes a stress on human praxis. Such a materialism is comprehensive in the sense that it identifies the sources of climate change as twofold: as rooted in a capitalist crisis and as rooted in a crisis in our conditions of life. Such a materialism is also theological: it is (...) ‘flesh made word’ (Nicholas Lash). One implication of this theological materialism is that creation is to be understood as good. This theme is explored by way of the ‘revolt of nature’: this trope provides a theological way of exploring nature in a changing climate. At the conclusion, critical issues raised by the title, Thinking like an animal, are addressed. (shrink)

A central claim of biosemiotics is the ascription of semiotic competence to nonhumans. For strange historical reasons, this claim has been quite controversial in much of standard biological discourse. An analysis of ethnographic material from Greenland demonstrates that people regard animals as nonhuman "persons". i.e., as sensing and thinking beings. Like humans. animals are supposed to have knowledge about their environment. Taking this semiotic competence as a fact beyond any doubt enables skilled hunters and fishermen to rely not only (...) on their own interpretation of the environment. but also on the animals' interpretation of their environment The behaviour of fish, seals, and land animals, meditated by their acknowledged semiotic competence, can thus be interpreted as giving signs about the behaviour, e.g., of whales and icebergs. This a priori ascription of semiotic competence is also apparent in discussions about management and regulation of animals. Rather than discussing whether "the stock" is depleted, much of the discourse among fishermen and hunters focuses on whether animals can be semiotically disturbed by what people are doing. (shrink)

In response to evaluations of On Animals: Volume 1, Systematic Theology by Margaret Adams, Christopher Carter, David Fergusson, and Stephen Webb, this article argues that the theological reappraisals of key doctrines argued for in the book are important for an adequate theological discussion of animals. The article addresses critical points raised by these authors in relation to the creation of human beings in the image of God, the doctrine of the incarnation, the theological ordering of creatures, anthropocentrism, and the doctrine (...) of God. It concludes that, given previous neglect, much more discussion by theologians is required in order to think better concerning the place of animals in Christian theology, but acting better toward fellow animal creatures is an important next step toward this goal. (shrink)

Engaging and passionate, this contemporary work provokes new ways of thinking about animal-human interaction. A cutting-edge volume of original essays, Critical Animal Studies examines our exploitation and commodification of non-human animals. By inquiring into the contradictions that have shaped our understanding of animals, the contributors of this collection have set out to question the systemic oppression inherent in our treatment of animals. The collection closes with a thoughtful consideration of some of the complexities of activism, as well (...) as a discussion of how to further the progress of animal rights. Analyzing economic, ethical, historical, and sociological aspects of human-animal relations, this interdisciplinary volume is a must-read for all upper-level students in animal studies, critical animal studies, animals and society, and anthrozoology courses. Features: draws together contributions from some of the most active and committed individuals advancing the field of critical animal studies takes a revolutionary approach to mainstream animal studies by advocating for justice from a politically progressive, abolitionist perspective supports curricular objectives of animal studies courses by encouraging students to critically analyze the shifting roles of animals in contemporary Western society and their consequences. (shrink)

Should animals have similar rights as humans? -- Is it moral to eat animals? -- Should animals be used for entertainment? -- Is it ethical to experiment on animals?

Thoughtprints Anne E. Berger andMarta Segarra I admit to it in the name of autobiography and in order to confide in you the following: [...] I have a particularly animalist perception and interpretation of what I do, think, write, live, ...

De-extinction is the process through which extinct species can be brought back into existence. Although these projects have the potential to cause great harm to animal welfare, discussion on issues surrounding de-extinction have focussed primarily on other issues. In this paper, I examine the potential types of welfare harm that can arise through de-extinction programs, including problems with cloning, captive rearing and re-introduction. I argue that welfare harm should be an important consideration when making decisions on de-extinction projects. Though (...) most of the proposed benefits of these projects are insufficient to outweigh the current potential welfare harm, these problems may be overcome with further development of the technology and careful selection of appropriate species as de-extinction candidates. (shrink)

We consider one of Eric Olson's chief arguments for animalism about personal identity: the view that we are each identical to a human animal. The argument was originally given in Olson's book The Human Animal . Olson's argument presupposes an epistemological premise which we examine in detail. We argue that the premise is implausible and that Olson's defense of animalism is therefore in trouble.

Collected essays by a leading philosopher situating the question of the animal in the broader context of a relational ontology.

This book provides an overview of the current debates about the nature and extent of our moral obligations to animals. Which, if any, uses of animals are morally wrong, which are morally permissible and why? What, if any, moral obligations do we, individually and as a society, have towards animals and why? How should animals be treated? Why? We will explore the most influential and most developed answers to these questions – given by philosophers, scientists, and animal advocates and (...) their critics – to try to determine which positions are supported by the best moral reasons. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the idea that the solution to some important problems of personal identity lies in the philosophy of language: more precisely in the nature of first-person reference. I will argue that the “linguistic solution” is at best partly successful.

Significant disagreement remains in ethics about the duties we have towards wild animals. This paper aims to mediate those disagreements by exploring how they are supported by, or diverge from, the common-sense ethical principles of non-maleficence, beneficence, autonomy and justice popular in medical ethics. We argue that these principles do not clearly justify traditional conservation or a ‘hands-off ’ approach to wild-animal welfare; instead, they support natural negative duties to reduce the harms that we cause as well as natural (...) positive duties to promote the welfare of wild animals. (shrink)