10th Bsw Lecture Listen To The Lion
Listen to the Lion: Wittgenstein and Animal Minds
Room 135
About the event
Event type: Lecture
Our intellectual traditions remain deeply conflicted about the nature, and even the existence, of minds other than the human. On the one hand, empirical inquiries reveal ever greater surprises about the cognitive capacities of other animals - capacities, which, in the human case, we explain in terms of concept possession.
Yet, within philosophy, arguments that deny non-linguistic animals the possession of concepts remain current and, to many, compelling, motivating a sceptical view of the conclusions of the animal sciences.
Following a survey and analysis of Wittgenstein's remarks about animals, I will distinguish and disarm different kinds of sceptical position about the existence and nature of non-human animal minds.
I will then use examples from the ethological sciences, to establish a principle of parity: that philosophical arguments concerning mind and meaning that are compelling in the human case, are, without additional arguments to the contrary, also so in the animal case.
Dr Ground's principal research interests are in aesthetics and the philosophy of mind particularly in regard to the minds of other animals.
For Sunderland University, he leads the national award winning Explore Programme. His publications include Can We Understand Animal Minds? (1998) and 'Do Animals Need a Theory of Mind? in Against Theory of Mind (2009), both co-authored with M. Bavidge, as well as Art or Bunk? (1989) and 'Must We Mean What We Play?' in Creative Chords: Studies in Music (2000).