Today's post is by Susana Mons ó who presents her new book Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death (Princeton, 2024). Susana Monsó is associate professor of philosophy in the Department of Logic, History, and Philosophy of Science at the National Distance Education University (UNED) in Madrid. She specialises in philosophy of animal minds, animal ethics, and philosophy of comparative psychology. Humans have traditionally thought of themselves as the only animals with a concept of death. Yet, recent years have witnessed a surge of studies that suggest that we may not be the only ones intrigued by this phenomenon. A chimpanzee was seen cleaning the teeth of the corpse of an adolescent of her group with whom she was closely bonded, crows will gather around the bodies of deceased conspecifics to learn about the circumstances of their death, elephants calves have been discovered seemingly buried by their elders, an orca mother was seen carrying her dead baby for seventeen d
On 26th and 27th September in Berlin, the Human Abilities Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities organised a workshop on conspiracy beliefs and delusions. This is a report of the workshop. Logo of the Human Abilities centre The first speaker was Romy Jaster (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) presented a talk on self-immunization in conspiracy theories. Romy thinks about conspiracy theories from an epistemological and philosophy of science perspective and she started her presentation with the conceptual distinction between "conspiracy theories" as a neutral term (an explanation that involves a conspiracy) and "conspiracy theories" as a negatively-valued term (an explanation that is epistemically deficient). What the epistemic deficit is is open to debate and controversy. Romy focused on the idea that conspiracy theories and delusions are both deficient because they are not responsive to counter-evidence. The idea is that conspiracy theories are built in such a