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  1. Boredom as Cognitive Allostasis.Andreas Elpidorou - forthcoming - In The Anatomy of Boredom. Oxford University Press.
    This is the penultimate and peer-reviewed version of Chapter 5 from The Anatomy of Boredom, to be published by Oxford University Press in late 2024/early 2025. Please note that this version may differ from the final published version. All rights to this work, including but not limited to rights of reproduction and distribution, are reserved by the publisher, Oxford University Press.
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  2. Boredom as Cognitive Allostasis.Andreas Elpidorou - forthcoming - In The Anatomy of Boredom. Oxford University Press.
    This is the penultimate and peer-reviewed version of Chapter 5 from Elpidorou, A., The Anatomy of Boredom, to be published by Oxford University Press in late 2024/early 2025. Please note that this version may differ from the final published version. All rights to this work, including but not limited to rights of reproduction and distribution, are reserved by the publisher, Oxford University Press.
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  3. Emotionless Animals? Constructionist Theories of Emotion Beyond the Human Case.Jonathan Birch - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (1):71-94.
    Could emotions be a uniquely human phenomenon? One prominent theory in emotion science, Lisa Feldman Barrett’s Theory of Constructed Emotion (tce), suggests they might be. The source of the sceptical challenge is that tce links emotions to abstract concepts tracking socio-normative expectations, and other animals are unlikely to have such concepts. Barrett’s own response to the sceptical challenge is to relativize emotion to the perspective of an interpreter, but this is unpromising. A more promising response may be to amend the (...)
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  4. The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI.Jonathan Birch - 2024 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure? What about crabs, shrimps, insects, or spiders? How do we tell whether a person unresponsive after severe brain injury might be suffering? When does a fetus in the womb start to have conscious experiences? Could there even be rudimentary feelings in miniature models of the human brain, grown from human stem cells? And what about AI? These are questions about the edge of sentience, and they are subject to enormous, disorienting uncertainty. The stakes are (...)
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  5. Rethinking core affect: the role of dominance in animal behaviour and welfare research.Víctor Carranza-Pinedo - 2024 - Synthese 203 (5):1-23.
    This paper critically examines the philosophical underpinnings of current experimental investigation into animal affect-related decision-making. Animals’ affective states are standardly operationalised by linking positively valenced states with “approach” behaviours and negatively valenced states with “avoidance” behaviours. While this operationalisation has provided a helpful starting point to investigate the ecological role of animals’ internal states, there is extensive evidence that valenced and motivational states do not always neatly align, namely, instances where “liking” does not entail “wanting” (and vice versa). To address (...)
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  6. In praise of animals.Rhys Borchert & Aliya R. Dewey - 2023 - Biology and Philosophy 38 (4):1-26.
    Reasons-responsive accounts of praiseworthiness say, roughly, that an agent is praiseworthy for an action just in case the reasons that explain why they acted are also the reasons that explain why the action is right. In this paper, we argue that reasons-responsive accounts imply that some actions of non-human animals are praiseworthy. Trying to exclude non-human animals, we argue, risks neglecting cases of inadvertent virtue in human action and undermining the anti-intellectualist commitments that are typically associated with reasons-responsive accounts. Of (...)
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  7. A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness.Walter Veit - 2023 - New York: Routledge.
    This book attempts to advance Donald Griffin's vision of the "final, crowning chapter of the Darwinian revolution" by developing a philosophy for the science of animal consciousness. It advocates a Darwinian bottom-up approach that treats consciousness as a complex, evolved, and multidimensional phenomenon in nature rather than a mysterious all-or-nothing property immune to the tools of science and restricted to a single species. -/- The so-called emergence of a science of consciousness in the 1990s has at best been a science (...)
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  8. Should Animal Welfare Be Defined in Terms of Consciousness?Jonathan Birch - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (5):1114-1123.
    Definitions of animal welfare often invoke consciousness or sentience. Marian Stamp Dawkins has argued that to define animal welfare this way is a mistake. In Dawkins’s alternative view, an animal with good welfare is one that is healthy and “has what it wants.” The dispute highlights a source of strain on the concept of animal welfare: consciousness-involving definitions are better able to capture the normative significance of welfare, whereas consciousness-free definitions facilitate the validation of welfare indicators. I reflect on how (...)
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  9. Animal Sentience.Heather Browning & Jonathan Birch - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (5):e12822.
    ‘Sentience’ sometimes refers to the capacity for any type of subjective experience, and sometimes to the capacity to have subjective experiences with a positive or negative valence, such as pain or pleasure. We review recent controversies regarding sentience in fish and invertebrates and consider the deep methodological challenge posed by these cases. We then present two ways of responding to the challenge. In a policy-making context, precautionary thinking can help us treat animals appropriately despite continuing uncertainty about their sentience. In (...)
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  10. How shallow is fear? Deepening the waters of emotion with a social/externalist account.Felipe Nogueira de Carvalho - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology (4):725-733.
    In The Deep History of Ourselves, Joseph LeDoux distinguishes between behavioral and physiological responses caused by the activation of defense circuits, and the emotion of fear. Although the former is found in nearly all bilateral animals, the latter is supposedly a unique human adaptation that requires language, reflective self-awareness, among other cognitive capacities. In this picture, fear is an autonoetic conscious experience that happens when defense circuit activation is integrated into self-awareness and the experience labeled with the “fear” concept. In (...)
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  11. Emotion.Charlie Kurth - 2022 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    Emotions have long been of interest to philosophers and have deep historical roots going back to the Ancients. They have also become one of the most exciting areas of current research in philosophy, the cognitive sciences, and beyond. -/- This book explains the philosophy of the emotions, structuring the investigation around seven fundamental questions: What are emotions? Are emotions natural kinds? Do animals have emotions? Are emotions epistemically valuable? Are emotions the foundation for value and morality? Are emotions the basis (...)
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  12. Animal moral psychologies.Susana Monsó & Kristin Andrews - 2022 - In Manuel Vargas & John Doris (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
    Observations of animals engaging in apparently moral behavior have led academics and the public alike to ask whether morality is shared between humans and other animals. Some philosophers explicitly argue that morality is unique to humans, because moral agency requires capacities that are only demonstrated in our species. Other philosophers argue that some animals can participate in morality because they possess these capacities in a rudimentary form. Scientists have also joined the discussion, and their views are just as varied as (...)
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  13. Health, consciousness, and the evolution of subjects.Walter Veit - 2022 - Synthese 201 (1):1-24.
    The goal of this programmatic paper is to highlight a close connection between the core problem in the philosophy of medicine, i.e. the concept of health, and the core problem of the philosophy of mind, i.e. the concept of consciousness. I show when we look at these phenomena together, taking the evolutionary perspective of modern state-based behavioural and life-history theory used as the teleonomic tool to Darwinize the agent- and subject-side of organisms, we will be in a better position to (...)
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  14. Evolutionary continuity between humans and non-human animals: Emotion and emotional expression.Zorana Todorovic - 2021 - Theoria (Beograd) 64 (4):19-36.
    This paper deals with the evolutionary origin and the adaptive function of emotion. I discuss the view that emotions have evolved as functional adaptations in both humans and non-human animals in order to cope with adaptive challenges and to promote fitness. I argue that there is evolutionary continuity between humans and animals in emotions and emotional expressions, and discuss behavioural argument for this thesis, specifically, Darwin’s and Ekman’s research on similarities in how humans and animals express their basic emotions. In (...)
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  15. Dimensions of Animal Consciousness.Jonathan Birch, Alexandra K. Schnell & Nicola S. Clayton - 2020 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 24 (10):789-801.
    How does consciousness vary across the animal kingdom? Are some animals ‘more conscious’ than others? This article presents a multidimensional framework for understanding interspecies variation in states of consciousness. The framework distinguishes five key dimensions of variation: perceptual richness, evaluative richness, integration at a time, integration across time, and self-consciousness. For each dimension, existing experiments that bear on it are reviewed and future experiments are suggested. By assessing a given species against each dimension, we can construct a consciousness profile for (...)
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  16. Emotions Inside Out: The Content of Emotions.Christine Tappolet - 2020 - In Christoph Demmerling & Dirk Schroder (eds.), Concepts in Thought, Action, and Emotion: New Essays. New York, NY: Routledge.
    Most of those who hold that emotions involve appraisals also accept that the content of emotions is nonconceptual. The main motivation for nonconceptulism regarding emotions is that it accounts for the difference between emotions and evaluative judgements. This paper argues that if one assumes a broadly Fregean account of concepts, there are good reasons to accept that emotions have nonconceptual contents. All the main arguments for nonconceptualism regarding sensory perception easily transpose to the case of emotions. The paper ends by (...)
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  17. Payback without bookkeeping: The origins of revenge and retaliation.Isaac Wiegman - 2019 - Philosophical Psychology 32 (7):1100-1128.
    ABSTRACTCurrent evolutionary models of revenge focus on its complex deterrent functions. Nevertheless, there are some retaliatory behaviors in nonhuman animals that do not appear to have a deterren...
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  18. Animal Morality: What It Means and Why It Matters.Susana Monsó, Judith Benz-Schwarzburg & Annika Bremhorst - 2018 - The Journal of Ethics 22 (3-4):283-310.
    It has been argued that some animals are moral subjects, that is, beings who are capable of behaving on the basis of moral motivations. In this paper, we do not challenge this claim. Instead, we presuppose its plausibility in order to explore what ethical consequences follow from it. Using the capabilities approach, we argue that beings who are moral subjects are entitled to enjoy positive opportunities for the flourishing of their moral capabilities, and that the thwarting of these capabilities entails (...)
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  19. Morality without mindreading.Susana Monsó - 2017 - Mind and Language 32 (3):338-357.
    Could animals behave morally if they can’t mindread? Does morality require mindreading capacities? Moral psychologists believe mindreading is contingently involved in moral judgements. Moral philosophers argue that moral behaviour necessarily requires the possession of mindreading capacities. In this paper, I argue that, while the former may be right, the latter are mistaken. Using the example of empathy, I show that animals with no mindreading capacities could behave on the basis of emotions that possess an identifiable moral content. Therefore, at least (...)
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  20. (1 other version)Animals as reflexive thinkers: The aponoian paradigm.Mark Rowlands & Susana Monsó - 2017 - In Linda Kalof (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies. Oxford University Press. pp. 319-341.
    The ability to engage in reflexive thought—in thought about thought or about other mental states more generally—is regarded as a complex intellectual achievement that is beyond the capacities of most nonhuman animals. To the extent that reflexive thought capacities are believed necessary for the possession of many other psychological states or capacities, including consciousness, belief, emotion, and empathy, the inability of animals to engage in reflexive thought calls into question their other psychological abilities. This chapter attacks the idea that reflexive (...)
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  21. Consciousness as an Adaptation. What animals feel and why.Pouwel Slurink - 2016 - In Andreas Blank (ed.), Animals: New Essays. Munich: Philosophia. pp. 303-332.
    Evolutionary epistemology (Lorenz, Vollmer) and value-driven decision theory (Pugh) are used to explain the fundamental properties of consciousness. It is shown that this approach is compatible with global workspace theory (Baars) and global neuronal workspace theory (De Haene). The emotions are, however, that what drives consciousness. A hypothetical evolutionary tree of the emotions is given – intended to show that consciousness evolves and is probably qualitatively different in different groups of animals.
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  22. Angry Rats and Scaredy Cats: Lessons from Competing Cognitive Homologies.Isaac Wiegman - 2016 - Biological Theory 11 (4):224-240.
    There have been several recent attempts to think about psychological kinds as homologies. Nevertheless, there are serious epistemic challenges for individuating homologous psychological kinds, or cognitive homologies. Some of these challenges are revealed when we look at competing claims of cognitive homology. This paper considers two competing homology claims that compare human anger with putative aggression systems of nonhuman animals. The competition between these hypotheses has been difficult to resolve in part because of what I call the boundary problem: boundaries (...)
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  23. Empathy and morality in behaviour readers.Susana Monsó - 2015 - Biology and Philosophy 30 (5):671-690.
    It is tempting to assume that being a moral creature requires the capacity to attribute mental states to others, because a creature cannot be moral unless she is capable of comprehending how her actions can have an impact on the well-being of those around her. If this assumption were true, then mere behaviour readers could never qualify as moral, for they are incapable of conceptualising mental states and attributing them to others. In this paper, I argue against such an assumption (...)
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  24. The Animal Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal Cognition.Kristin Andrews - 2014 - Routledge.
    The study of animal cognition raises profound questions about the minds of animals and philosophy of mind itself. Aristotle argued that humans are the only animal to laugh, but in recent experiments rats have also been shown to laugh. In other experiments, dogs have been shown to respond appropriately to over two hundred words in human language. In this introduction to the philosophy of animal minds Kristin Andrews introduces and assesses the essential topics, problems and debates as they cut across (...)
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  25. Anger and Punishment: Natural History and Normative Significance.Isaac Wiegman - 2014 - Dissertation, Washington University in St. Louis
    I argue that the evolutionary history of anger has substantive implications for normative ethics. In the process, I develop an evolutionary account of anger and its influence on action. First, I consider a prominent argument by Peter Singer and Joshua Greene. They conclude that evolutionary explanations of human cooperation debunk – or undercut the evidential value of – the moral intuitions supporting duty ethics (as opposed to utilitarian or consequentialist ethics). With this argument they aim to defend consequentialist theories. However, (...)
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  26. From Locus Neoclassicus to Locus Rattus: Notes on Laughter, Comprehensiveness, and Titillation.Karl Pfeifer - 2006 - Res Cogitans 3 (1).
    Abstract. This paper illustrates how philosophy and science may converge and inform one another. I begin with a brief rehearsal of John Morreall’s “formulaic” theory of laughter, that laughter results from a pleasant psychological shift, and of my previously published criticisms and counterproposal that laughter results from titillation (where “titillation” is a semitechnical term). I defend my own position against charges that it is trivial, circular, or vacuous (charges that, if correct, would apply equally to Morreall’s position), showing that these (...)
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