Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be on Tuesday 5th May, 2.30-4.15pm, when Professor Hans-Johann Glock (Zurich) will give a talk entitled, 'Of Toads, Dogs and Men: Agency, Intelligence and Reason in Human and Non-Human Animals' (abstract below). The talk will be in Newnham College's Sidgwick Hall.
For non-members, there is a small charge for attendance at a single meeting: £2 for students, £3 for others. We hope to see many of you there. Best wishes, Ali Boyle and Matthew Simpson *Abstract: *My general topic is action by non-human, non-linguistic animals (henceforth simply ‘amimals’). In this context I address the following questions: 1. Can animals act or do they merely behave? 1. Can animals act intelligently? 2. Can animals act intentionally? 3. Can animals act for a reason? 4. Can animals reason? I shall answer all of these questions in the affirmative, albeit with an increasing number of qualifications and caveats as we move down the list. My target is lingualism, a popular position that answers all of these questions resolutely in the negative, on general a priori grounds. It maintains that, for conceptual reasons, that various types of (rational) agency require language. In the course of engaging with lingualism I shall dwell on four main points. The first is the need to distinguish not just inanimate and animate activity, but also plant activity from animal behaviour. The second is the unduly neglected and maligned notion of intelligence and its connection to various notions of rationality/reason. The third is that the revisionist move from a subjectivist to an objectivist conception of reasons eliminates a substantial obstacle to the idea that animals can act for reasons; instead of requiring a second-order awareness of their own mental states, all they need to be able to do is to act in the light of objective states of affairs. Finally, I shall consider conceptual reservations about, respectively, theoretical and practical reasoning in animals that have yet to be addressed by believers in animal rationality. -- Ali Boyle and Matthew Simpson Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
