British Wittgenstein Society

Do at least some animals have minds comparable to those of humans?

This question has exercised philosophy and science since their inception. It is also prominent in the wider public sphere, on account of its moral, legal, and political implications. The connection between the question of animal minds and ethics is two-fold.

Animal Morals: do animals have moral beliefs, attitudes, sentiments or practices?
Animal Ethics: How should we treat animals? What are our obligations towards them?
Professor Glock’s lecture shall explore both. Against current fashion, Glock maintains that the scope for animal morals is severely limited but that – contra contractualism – animals needn’t possess any morality in order for us to have duties towards them. Glock resists the tendency among some activists and philosophers to base claims about the nature and scope of animal minds on preconceived ethical views. This is to put the cart before horse: our moral obligations towards animals depend on their mental capacities. The lecture shall thus explore whether at least some animals possess mental capacities (e.g. ones relating to sensation, belief, intention, and reasoning) connected to various kinds of moral status.

Hans-Johann Glock is Professor of Philosophy and Head of Department at the University of Zurich (Switzerland), as well as Visiting Professor at the University of Reading (UK). He is the author of A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Blackwell 1996), Quine and Davidson (CUP 2003), La mente de los animals (KRK 2009) and What is Analytic Philosophy? (CUP 2008), as well as editing and co-editing numerous other publications. He has published numerous articles in leading international journals on Wittgenstein, the history of analytic philosophy, meta-philosophy, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of animal minds. He has been a Visiting Professor at Queen’s University, Canada, a Hugh-Le May Fellow at Rhodes University, South-Africa, a fellow of the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg, Germany and a recipient of a Humboldt Research Prize. He is currently working on a book about animal minds.

Refreshments will be available from 18:30 and the lecture will start at 19:00.

Further information on the Francis Bacon Lecture Series

The lecture will be preceded by a workshop at 13:00 in room W042 (Law Court Building), on animal minds and morals with talks by Maria Balaska, Mikel Burley, Luke Cash, Niklas Forsberg, and Sasha Lawson-Frost. Places at the workshop are free but limited so please register by email.
www.herts.ac.uk/about-us/events/2019/april/animal-minds-and-animal-morals-francis-bacon-lecture

Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics (aesthetics.ff.cuni.cz) invites submissions for a special issue on the topic of Wittgenstein and Aesthetics. The submissions should not exceed 9000 words and must be written in English and prepared for blind peer review (see the journal’s website for more specific guidelines).

Confirmed contributors to the special issue are Severin Schroeder (University of Reading) and Joachim Schulte (University of Zürich).

Aesthetics and the arts figure prominently in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work. We find remarks on these themes in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations as well as in those manuscripts, lectures, and personal notebooks that have been edited and published posthumously. Most recently, the publication of Wittgenstein: Lectures, Cambridge 1930–1933: From the Notes of G. E. Moore in 2016 (CUP) made previously inaccessible notes on Wittgenstein’s lectures on aesthetics available to scholars, disclosing features of his thought on aesthetics not discernible elsewhere in his published work. Typically, Wittgenstein’s remarks on aesthetics and the arts appear in his writing intermittently and in close connection to other themes that occupy his thought, such as language, mathematics, and the nature of philosophy. Hence, the questions whether Wittgenstein had an account of aesthetics and what the philosophical relevance of his remarks on aesthetics is remain subject to debate.

Estetika welcomes submissions on all aspects of Wittgenstein’s treatment of aesthetics and the arts, but discussions (both scholarly and more systematic in orientation) on the general philosophical import of his thought on aesthetics are especially encouraged.

Submissions should be sent by the 15th of September at the latest to

The planned publication schedule is as follows:
‒ Submission deadline: 15th of September 2019
‒ Decision and comments sent out: 31st of October 2019
‒ Final drafts due on: 15th of December 2019
‒ Publication date: end of March 2020