The Philosophy of Animal Minds

Do animals think? Are they self-aware? Do they have emotions? This book explores the philosophical issues concerning animal minds.

Robert W. Lurz (Edited by)

9780521885027, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 September 2009

322 pages, 5 tables
23.5 x 16 x 1.9 cm, 0.63 kg

'… a highly stimulating collection of papers which considerably advances the philosophy of animal minds. It will be of interest both within the borders of philosophy of mind and in the rapidly expanding scientific disciplines involved with animal thought and feeling.' Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

This volume is a collection of fourteen essays by leading philosophers on issues concerning the nature, existence, and our knowledge of animal minds. The nature of animal minds has been a topic of interest to philosophers since the origins of philosophy, and recent years have seen significant philosophical engagement with the subject. However, there is no volume that represents the current state of play in this important and growing field. The purpose of this volume is to highlight the state of the debate. The issues which are covered include whether and to what degree animals think in a language or in iconic structures, possess concepts, are conscious, self-aware, metacognize, attribute states of mind to others, and have emotions, as well as issues pertaining to our knowledge of and the scientific standards for attributing mental states to animals.

Philosophy of animal minds: an introduction Robert W. Lurz
1. What do animals think? Dale Jamieson
2. Attributing mental representations to animals Eric Saidel
3. Chrysippus's dog as a case study in non-linguistic cognition Michael Rescorla
4. Systematicity and intentional realism in honeybee navigation Michael Tetzlaff and Georges Rey
5. Invertebrate concepts confront the generality constraint (and win) Peter Carruthers
6. A language of baboon thought? Elisabeth Camp
7. Animal communication and neo-expressivism Andrew McAninch, Grant Goodrich and Colin Allen
8. Mindreading in the animal kingdom? José Bermúdez
9. The representational basis of brute metacognition: a proposal Joëlle Proust
10. Animals, consciousness, and I-thoughts Rocco J. Gennaro
11. Self-awareness in animals David DeGrazia
12. The sophistication of non-human emotion Robert C. Roberts
13. Parsimony and models of animal minds Elliott Sober
14. The primate mind-reading controversy: a case study in simplicity and methodology in animal psychology Simon Fitzpatrick
Glossary of key terms
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Animal behaviour [PSVP], Philosophy of mind [HPM]