Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by David Edmonds, presenter and producer at the BBC, host of The Big Idea , author of many books, including Would You Kill the Fat Man? and (with John Eidinow)  Wittgenstein’s Poker . David is also a senior research associate at Oxford University’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle.  In this post he introduces his new book, Ethics and the Contemporary World. I was rummaging through my attic last week when I came across some notes and essays I’d written as an undergraduate and graduate studying ethics in the 1980s. What surprised me – apart from the clunky prose and the no-nonsense typeface produced by my clunky dot-matrix printer – was the narrowness of subject range. There was a lot, for example, on abortion. It’s easy to forget that abortion was only legalized in Britain in 1967 and the key Supreme Court ruling in the US, Roe v Wade, was in 1973. Then there was capital punishment – the death penalty...

Today's post is by Michael Tye on his book Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs: Are animals conscious ? . I’m a philosopher at the University of Texas at Austin. I encountered philosophy at Oxford and I’ve taught at Temple University, London University, and the University of St Andrews as well as at Texas. I’ve published widely on consciousness and I am associated with a view that has come to be known as representationalism .   The book described below, published by OUP in November 2016, remains neutral on the question as to the right view on the nature of consciousness. Do birds have feelings? What about fish – can fish feel pain? Do insects have experiences? Can a honeybee feel anxious? If trees aren't conscious but fish are, what's the objective difference that makes a difference? How do we decide which living creatures have experiences and which are zombies? Can there be a conscious robot? This book advances philosophically rigorous, empirically informed ans...