- Department of Philosophy
University of Miami
Coral Gables, FL 33124
USA
Mark Rowlands
University of Miami, Philosophy, Faculty Member
- Philosophy of Mind, Cognitive Science, Animal Cognition, Animal Ethics, Philosophy, Consciousness, and 26 moreMoral, Animals, Extended Mind, Situated Cognition, Enactivism, Mental Representation, Husserl, Action, Reasons, Mark of the Cognitive, Intentiionality, Ethics, Phenomenology, Self and Identity, Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Agency, Intentionality, Distributed Cognition, Environmental Ethics, Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Gottlob Frege, Anthrozoology, Philosophy of Sport, Memory Studies, and Cultural Memoryedit
This is a draft of the opening chapter of my book, Animal Rights: Essential Knowledge, forthcoming with MIT Press sometime in 2023 (I should imagine)
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This chapter introduces the central themes, and outlines the central argument, of the book. Three dominant environmental threats are identified: climate change, mass extinction, and pestilence. The warming of the planet is accelerating.... more
This chapter introduces the central themes, and outlines the central argument, of the book. Three dominant environmental threats are identified: climate change, mass extinction, and pestilence. The warming of the planet is accelerating. At the same time, species are becoming extinct at a startling rate. Newly emerging infectious diseases—COVID-19 being the latest off the production line—are becoming more pronounced and problematic. It is argued that our habit of eating animals—and the massive reallocation of biomass that it involves—lies at the heart of all of all three problems, and if we abandon this habit, we can make substantial progress in tackling them. This proposal should be taken seriously on the grounds that it is easier to implement, more effective once implemented, and ultimately more palatable than other options.
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This is the penultimate version of the opening chapter of my book Can Animals Be Persons? (New York: Oxford University Press, May 2019).
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There are no insuperable logical or conceptual obstacles to regarding animals as capable of moral behavior. It is true, there are accounts of moral action that would preclude animals acting on the basis of moral motivations. But, equally,... more
There are no insuperable logical or conceptual obstacles to regarding animals as capable of moral behavior. It is true, there are accounts of moral action that would preclude animals acting on the basis of moral motivations. But, equally, there are other accounts that are entirely compatible with this possibility. I shall first identify each type of account, and then present some arguments in favor of the latter.
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This paper explores certain facets of Christine Korsgaard’s paper, ‘Prospects for a Naturalistic Explanation of the Good’ (2018). Korsgaard’s account requires that an animal be able to experience ‘herself trying to get or avoid... more
This paper explores certain facets of Christine Korsgaard’s paper, ‘Prospects for a Naturalistic Explanation of the Good’ (2018). Korsgaard’s account requires that an animal be able to experience ‘herself trying to get or avoid something’. The claim that animals possess such self-awareness is regarded by many as problematic and, if this is correct, it would jeopardize Korsgaard’s account. This paper argues that animals can, in fact, be aware of themselves in the way required by Korsgaard’s account.
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This paper examines the ideas of consciousness, intentionality and pre-reflective awareness as they feature in Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Consciousness is nothingness in the sense that no intentional object of awareness can ever be... more
This paper examines the ideas of consciousness, intentionality and pre-reflective awareness as they feature in Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Consciousness is nothingness in the sense that no intentional object of awareness can ever be part of consciousness. Intentional directedness towards an object is a form of revealing activity in which an object is presented as being a certain way. This activity is underwritten by a mastery of the relations between environmental and bodily contingencies and the resulting consequences for appearance of the intentional object. Pre-reflective awareness is built in to intentional directedness towards the world in virtue of the fact that many, perhaps all, of the contingencies that underwrite such directedness are ones in which the conscious subject is implicated. All three of these ideas are offered both as interpretations Sartre’s view, and also as claims in their own right which, I suspect, stand a very good chance of being true.
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Theories of mental content have been dominated by a model supplied by the propositional attitudes. This paper explores what our conception of such content would look like of we began, instead, with episodic memory. The content of episodic... more
Theories of mental content have been dominated by a model supplied by the propositional attitudes. This paper explores what our conception of such content would look like of we began, instead, with episodic memory. The content of episodic memory is essentially autonoetic. Remembered episodes must be amended to the extent required to safeguard the modal status of this autonoeticity. This entails that the identity of the person who entertains content is stamped all over that content.
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The idea of moral enhancement has no clear meaning. This is because the idea of being moral has no clear meaning. There are numerous ways in which one might go astray, morally speaking, and each of these ways, in turn, fragments on... more
The idea of moral enhancement has no clear meaning. This is because the idea of being moral has no clear meaning. There are numerous ways in which one might go astray, morally speaking, and each of these ways, in turn, fragments on further analysis. The concept of moral enhancement is as broad, messy and mottled as the reasons why people behave badly. This mottled character of moral failure calls into question the feasibility of (non-traditional) programs of moral enhancement.
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This is a series of short pieces I did for the Brains Blog in November 2016. Collectively, they provide a précis of my book Memory and the Self: Phenomenology, Science and Autobiography, which was published by OUP-New York during that... more
This is a series of short pieces I did for the Brains Blog in November 2016. Collectively, they provide a précis of my book Memory and the Self: Phenomenology, Science and Autobiography, which was published by OUP-New York during that month.
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I am enormously grateful to all those who took the time to respond to my target article Are animals persons? These responses of mine are offered in this spirit of gratitude. While I find myself in agreement with many of the commentators,... more
I am enormously grateful to all those who took the time to respond to my target article Are animals persons? These responses of mine are offered in this spirit of gratitude. While I find myself in agreement with many of the commentators, various areas of disagreement undoubtedly exist, and I am delighted to have this opportunity to clarify or reinforce my position. I have organized my comments by way of certain prevailing themes that emerged in the respondents' comments rather than on a respondent-by-respondent basis. To begin, let me recap some of the central ideas of the paper. First, there are three common assumptions – one of which I accept, the other two I challenge. 1. A person, I accept for the sake of argument, is a unified mental life. This assumption is contestable. On the one hand, there are those who think a person is not an essentially psychological entity at all, but a physical entity. Such a person, however, is far less likely to be hostile to the idea that animals are persons. On the other hand, there are those (e.g. Parfit 1984) who think that having unified mental life is not sufficient for being a person. This latter position is beyond the scope of the paper, and I merely note this and move on. The core of the paper concerns self-awareness rather than personhood as such. 2. It is common to assume that unity is something added to a mental life. On the one hand there is a mental life – a succession of thoughts, feelings, emotions and the like. On the other, there is the question of whether this succession of thoughts, feelings and emotions forms a unified whole. There could be a mental life that was merely a jumble of disassociated mental states. For a mental life to be unified, something extra must be added, over and above the mere presence of mental states and processes. 3. The additional element, it is equally common to assume, is provided by reflective self-awareness. When someone is reflectively self-aware, she has a mental state that is either about (1) herself, (2) a bodily state of hers, or (3) another mental state of hers. Herself, the bodily state or the mental state is the intentional object of her mental state. For example, if I think I'm getting old, that my knees are not what they used to be, or that I am in pain, I am reflectively self-aware. Crucial to reflective self-awareness is the existence of an intentional state that is directed towards the person, or some or other facet of the person, who has it. When Locke says that a person is able to consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing from one time to another, it is tempting (and common) to understand Locke's claim as one of reflective self-awareness: a person is able to think of itself as itself, etc.
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This paper advances two methodological rules of thumb. First, whenever there is a capacity that animals seem to have, and also a philosophical account that entails they cannot have it, the latter should be treated with considerable... more
This paper advances two methodological rules of thumb. First, whenever there is a capacity that animals seem to have, and also a philosophical account that entails they cannot have it, the latter should be treated with considerable suspicion. The philosophical account may ultimately turn out to be correct, but the initial, operative, assumption should be that it is not. Much work will have to be done if the philosophical account is to prove ultimately acceptable. This is compatible with the capacity in question taking a somewhat different form in humans – that is a matter for further investigation. But our initial, basic account of this capacity should be guided by its presence in animals. Second, since controversial philosophical doctrines have a habit of evolving into common sense, I also advance a second, methodological rule: when empirical evidence suggests that animals have a capacity that common sense thinks they cannot, we are obliged to take this evidence seriously, to examine why common sense arrived at this conclusion, and whether it was right to do so.
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It is orthodox to suppose that very few, if any, nonhuman animals are persons. The category of the person is restricted to self-aware creatures: in effect humans (above a certain age) and possibly some of the great apes and cetaceans. I... more
It is orthodox to suppose that very few, if any, nonhuman animals are persons. The category of the person is restricted to self-aware creatures: in effect humans (above a certain age) and possibly some of the great apes and cetaceans. I shall argue that this orthodoxy should be rejected, because it rests on a mistaken conception of the kind of self-awareness relevant to personhood. Replacing this with a sense of self-awareness that is relevant requires us to accept that personhood is much more widely distributed through the animal kingdom.
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This paper examines the claim that our moral commitments to non-human animals (henceforth, “animals”) are best captured in terms of a framework of political, rather than ethical, theory – or, at the very least, that the former provides an... more
This paper examines the claim that our moral commitments to non-human animals (henceforth, “animals”) are best captured in terms of a framework of political, rather than ethical, theory – or, at the very least, that the former provides an essential antidote to the failings of the latter. In particular, I shall focus on what I take to be a canonical statement of this view: Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s book, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. In this book, Donaldson and Kymlicka (henceforth, D&K) argue that standard ethical animal rights theory (henceforth, following them, ART) is importantly incomplete, and requires supplementation with a political theory of animal rights (henceforth, PTAR). I going to argue that while ART, as it has standardly perceived, has shortcomings, these are more perception than reality, and are certainly not intrinsic or essential features of ART. Consequently, the supplementation of ART with PTAR is not necessary. The distinction between ART and PTAR is a disguised, and somewhat misleading way, of talking about another distinction: the distinction between animals as objects of moral concern and animals as subjects of motivation and action.
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Intentional directedness towards an object is best understood as a form of revealing or disclosing activity. Cognition extends beyond the brain because disclosing activity typically - not always, not necessarily - straddles operations... more
Intentional directedness towards an object is best understood as a form of revealing or disclosing activity. Cognition extends beyond the brain because disclosing activity typically - not always, not necessarily - straddles operations occurring in the brain, the body, and ones performed on the environment of the organism. There is nothing special about revealing activity that occurs in the brain that requires us to restrict labels such as 'cognitive' or 'mental' to it alone.
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This paper defends the idea that (some) animals can be moral subjects. A moral subject is an individual that acts on the basis of moral motivations but is not, necessarily, responsible for it does. Both the desirability of the category of... more
This paper defends the idea that (some) animals can be moral subjects. A moral subject is an individual that acts on the basis of moral motivations but is not, necessarily, responsible for it does. Both the desirability of the category of the moral subject and the irreducibility of the category to that of the moral agent will be defended. 'Ought' does not imply 'can'. There are no insuperable conceptual obstacles to regarding (some) animals as capable of moral behavior.
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Through the examination of the lives (or afterlives) of several immortal beings, this paper defends a version of Moritz Schlick’s claim that the meaning of life is play. More precisely: a person’s life has meaning to the extent it there... more
Through the examination of the lives (or afterlives) of several immortal beings, this paper defends a version of Moritz Schlick’s claim that the meaning of life is play. More precisely: a person’s life has meaning to the extent it there are things in it that the person values (i) intrinsically rather than merely instrumentally and (ii) above a certain threshold of intensity. This is a subjectivist account of meaning in life. I defend subjectivism about meaning in life from common objections by understanding statements about life’s meaning in quasi-realist terms.
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This paper identifies a form of remembering sufficiently overlooked that it has not yet been dignified with a name. I shall christen it Rilkean Memory. This form of memory is, typically, embodied and embedded. It is a form of involuntary,... more
This paper identifies a form of remembering sufficiently overlooked that it has not yet been dignified with a name. I shall christen it Rilkean Memory. This form of memory is, typically, embodied and embedded. It is a form of involuntary, autobiographical memory that is neither implicit nor explicit, neither declarative nor procedural, neither episodic nor semantic, and not Freudian. While a discussion of the importance of Rilkean memory lies beyond the scope of this paper, I shall try to show that admitting Rilkean memory into our ontology does point us in the direction of a very different conception of the mind and mental processes.
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This paper argues that there are no mental representations. At least, there are no mental representations if we think of these as structures that bear mental content. There are no mental representations because there is no mental content.... more
This paper argues that there are no mental representations. At least, there are no mental representations if we think of these as structures that bear mental content. There are no mental representations because there is no mental content. More accurately, if there is such content, we are unable to say very much about it: not the sorts of things we need to be able to say if we want to believe in an apparatus of mental representations. This does not mean that there is no content. On the contrary, there is plenty of it: the world may even be a totality of it. But this content is not specifically mental.
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This paper argues against Hutto and Satne's baseball-inspired program for solving the problem of intentionality.
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This paper defends an adverbial interpretation of Sartre's account of pre-reflective consciousness, according to which non-positional self-consciousness should be understood as an adverbial modification of an act of positional... more
This paper defends an adverbial interpretation of Sartre's account of pre-reflective consciousness, according to which non-positional self-consciousness should be understood as an adverbial modification of an act of positional consciousness.
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It is common to assume that the case for 4e cognition stands or falls on its compatibility with cognitive science. If the science is willing to allow that cognition can be embodied, embedded, enacted and/or extended then cognition is, or... more
It is common to assume that the case for 4e cognition stands or falls on its compatibility with cognitive science. If the science is willing to allow that cognition can be embodied, embedded, enacted and/or extended then cognition is, or can be, some or all of these things. If it is not willing allow this, then they cannot. This paper, in contrast, develops a philosophical argument for extended mental processes that does not depend on actual or anticipated developments in cognitive science. The argument is inspired by work in the phenomenological tradition in philosophy and is grounded in a picture of intentionality. Intentionality, it will be argued, is disclosing activity. And mental processes are extended because such activity, often – not always, not necessarily, straddles – neural processes, non-cranial bodily processes, and things a subject does in and to its environment.
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Consciousness can be extended to the extent it is intentional. Intentionality is revealing activity, and revealing activity often (not always, not necessarily) straddles processes occurring both inside and outside the subject's head.
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The question of whether cognition requires representations has engendered heated discussion during the last two decades. I shall argue that the question is, in all likelihood, a spurious one. There may or may not be a fact of the matter... more
The question of whether cognition requires representations has engendered heated discussion during the last two decades. I shall argue that the question is, in all likelihood, a spurious one. There may or may not be a fact of the matter concerning whether a given item qualifies as a representation. However, even if there is, attempts to establish whether cognition requires representation have neither practical nor theoretical utility.
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This paper explores two questions. First, is there a virtue ethical case for the moral claims of animals. Second, can animals act in morally virtuous ways.
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Continuing with the Ten Years On theme for Can Animals Be Moral? Here is my response to Robert Streiffer's critique of the book in the journal Mind.
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A ten-year retrospective of my book Can Animals Be Moral (OUP 2012) and subsequent developments in multiple parts. This Part 1 is a response to Simon Fitzpatrick's critique of the question of moral behavior in animals.