Animals Minds: Reasonings and Social Understanding (030078-WiSe 2024/25)

Modern philosophy of mind aims at understanding the mental abilities not only of human beings but also of nonhuman animals. A comparative perspective contrasting the cognitive abilities of both is very helpful to enrich our understanding of intelligent minds. Central question of our seminar will be: How do animals solve particular tasks? Do they have mental maps, metacognition, or number concepts? How do animals solve problems: do they engage in logical reasoning, causal reasoning, future planning? How social are animals and what is the role of their feelings for their cognition: are they able to develop a certain understanding of the others as mental agents and to interact e.g. as empathic agents? We want to take up these questions and discuss central articles developing recent observations and arguments to characterize animals behavior. This will allow us to develop a new perspective on animal minds and also our to human minds. The evolutionary perspective also relativizes some of our human cognitive abilities: Here a background claim is that all mental abilities of humans have essential roots in the animal kingdom. Methodologically, we will make use of the paradigm of ‘Situated Cognition’ according to which we need to account for the ecological environment and challenges of a species (the ecological niche) to adequately evaluate the cognitive abilities underlying a behavior.
Englisch: Modern philosophy of mind aims at understanding the mental abilities not only of human beings but also of nonhuman animals. A comparative perspective contrasting the cognitive abilities of both is very helpful to enrich our understanding of intelligent minds. Central question of our seminar will be: How do animals solve particular tasks? Do they have mental maps, metacognition, or number concepts? How do animals solve problems: do they engage in logical reasoning, causal reasoning, future planning? How social are animals and what is the role of their feelings for their cognition: are they able to develop a certain understanding of the others as mental agents and to interact e.g. as empathic agents? We want to take up these questions and discuss central articles developing recent observations and arguments to characterize animals behavior. This will allow us to develop a new perspective on animal minds and also our to human minds. The evolutionary perspective also relativizes some of our human cognitive abilities: Here a background claim is that all mental abilities of humans have essential roots in the animal kingdom. Methodologically, we will make use of the paradigm of ‘Situated Cognition’ according to which we need to account for the ecological environment and challenges of a species (the ecological niche) to adequately evaluate the cognitive abilities underlying a behavior.
Semester: WiSe 2024/25