"Everything I Know I Learned From TV" uses characters we all know and love and their TV worlds to explain the great questions of philosophy. The only qualifications you need to join in are ownership of a sofa, a remote control, a sense of humour and an enquiring mind. The philosophy discussed is very much 'life' philosophy, answering the questions we all want to know: How do you define what is a good life to lead? "The Simpsons" disagree over the right way to live with Nietzsche and Diogenes on hand to take sides. What is real happiness? Aristotle fights Descartes for the heart and mind of "Sex and the City's" Carrie Bradshaw. Can a good person do a bad thing? Kant and Socrates pay a call on Tony Soprano and his latter-day Mob to talk moral philosophy. Where does love end and friendship begin? Rachel and Ross ask Plato about the philosophy of emotions and wonder if they're just good friends. Is the pursuit of self-knowledge a good thing? Socrates helps Niles and Frasier Crane and their dad deal with the relative merit of the examined and the unexamined life. And much more. "Excellent- distinctly laddish- serves to inject a degree of passion into the bloodless halls of philosophy - not only is each chapter a model of philosophical exposition, conveying philosophical ideas with exemplary verve and clarity, the book also manages to connect the philosophy to the movies in a natural and convincing way." - "TLS". "Hugely entertaining...Rowlands knows his stuff and marries some of the tougher philosophical arguments to the more accessible conduit of popular entertainment...enjoyable and illuminating" - "Waterstone's Books Quarterly".

Everything I Know I Learned from TV: Philosophy for the Unrepentant Couch Potato

Humor & Entertainment

Rowlands, Mark

Television

Ebury Pr

Ever sat down to watch your favorite TV show and thought, How can doing this teach me how to live a better life, make the world a fairer place, define good from bad?” Mark Rowlands uses our favorite television shows to answer the great questions of philosophy. Let Buffy the Vampire Slayer make sense of the burden of responsibility, Ross and Rachel teach you about love and friendship, 24’s Jack Bauer explain the importance of justiceall ably assisted by the finest philosophical theorists who have ever lived: Nietzsche, Epicurus, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle.

Ebury Press

From eye-witness accounts of elephants apparently mourning the death of family members to an experiment that showed that hungry rhesus monkeys would not take food if doing so gave another monkey an electric shock, there is much evidence of animals displaying what seem to be moral feelings. But despite such suggestive evidence, philosophers steadfastly deny that animals can act morally, and for reasons that virtually everyone has found convincing. In Can Animals be Moral?, philosopher Mark Rowlands examines the reasoning of philosophers and scientists on this question--ranging from Aristotle and Kant to Hume and Darwin--and reveals that their arguments fall far short of compelling. The basic argument against moral behavior in animals is that humans have capabilities that animals lack. We can reflect on our motivations, formulate abstract principles that allow that allow us to judge right from wrong. For an actor to be moral, he or she must be able scrutinize their motivations and actions. No animal can do these things--no animal is moral. Rowland naturally agrees that humans possess a moral consciousness that no animal can rival, but he argues that it is not necessary for an individual to have the ability to reflect on his or her motives to be moral. Animals can't do all that we can do, but they can act on the basis of some moral reasons--basic moral reasons involving concern for others. And when they do this, they are doing just what we do when we act on the basis of these reasons: They are acting morally.

Can Animals Be Moral?

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Oxford University Press

The idea that our memories, in some sense, make us who we are, is a common one-and not at all implausible. After all, what could make us who we are if not the things we have experienced, thought, felt and desired on these idiosyncratic pathways through space and time that we call lives? And how can we retain these experiences, thoughts, feelings and desires if not through memory? On the other hand, most of what we have experienced has been forgotten. And there is now a considerable body of evidence that suggests that, even when we think we remember, our memories are likely to be distorted, sometimes beyond recognition. Imagine writing your autobiography, only to find that that most of it has been redacted, and much of the rest substantially rewritten. What would hold this book together? What would make it the unified and coherent account of a life?The answer, Mark Rowlands argues, lies, partially hidden, in a largely unrecognized form of memory-Rilkean memory. A Rilkean memory is produced when the content of a memory is lost but the act of remembering endures, in a new, mutated, form: a mood, a feeling, or a behavioral disposition. Rilkean memories play a significant role in holding the self together in the face of the poverty and inaccuracy of the contents of memory. But Rilkean memories are important not just because of what they are, but also because of what they were before they became such memories. Acts of remembering sculpt the contents of memories out of the slabs of remembered episodes. Our acts of remembering ensure that we are in the content of each of our memories-present in the way a sculptor is present in his creation-even when this content is lamentably sparse and endemically inaccurate.

Memory and the Self: Phenomenology, Science and Autobiography

Can animals be persons? To this question, scientific and philosophical consensus has taken the form of a resounding, 'No!' In this book, Mark Rowlands disagrees. Not only can animals be persons, many of them probably are. Taking, as his starting point, John Locke's classic definition of a person, as "a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself the same thinking thing, in different times and places," Rowlands argues that many animals can satisfy all of these conditions. A person is an individual in which four features coalesce: consciousness, rationality, self-awareness and other-awareness, and many animals are such individuals. Consciousness--something that is like to have an experience--is widely distributed through the animal kingdom. Many animals are capable of both causal and logical reasoning. Many animals are also self-aware, since a form of self-awareness is essentially built into the possession of conscious experience. And some animals are capable of a kind of awareness of the minds of others, quite independently of whether they possess a theory of mind. This is not just a book about animals, however. As well as being fascinating in their own right, animals, as Claude Levi-Strauss once put it, are "good to think." In this seamless interweaving of the empirical study of animal minds with philosophy and its history, this book makes a powerful case for the idea that reflection on animals allows us to better understand each of these four pillars of personhood, and so illuminates what means for any individual--animal or human--to be conscious, rational, self- and other-aware.

Can Animals Be Persons?

History

World

Mark Rowlands presents a novel analysis of three epoch-defining environmental problems: climate, extinction, and pestilence. Our climate is changing at a rate that is unprecedented and, if unchecked, disastrous. Species are disappearing hundreds or thousands of times faster than normal. COVID-19 has wreaked social and economic havoc but is merely the latest off a blossoming production line of emerging infectious diseases, many of which have the potential to be far worse.\nRowlands establishes that all three problems are consequences of choices we have made about energy, which can be divided into two major forms: fuel and food. Focusing on food choices as far more central to the issue than commonly recognized, he argues that the solution is breaking our collective habit of eating animals. Rowlands shows that in doing so, we stem our insatiable hunger for land, which he identifies as central to the problems of extinction and pestilence. He explains that reversing the industrial farming of animals for food will first, substantially cut climate emissions, rapidly enough to allow sustainable energy technologies time to become viable alternatives; and most importantly, make vast areas of a land available for the kind of aggressive afforestation policy that he shows as necessary to bring all three problems under control.\nWith World on Fire, Mark Rowlands identifies the source of our environmental ills and provides a compelling and accessible account of how to solve them.

World on Fire: Humans, Animals, and the Future of the Planet

Animal Rights: Moral Theory and Practice

In this 2nd edition the author has substantially revised his book throughout, updating the moral arguments and adding a chapter on animal minds. Importantly, rather than being a polemic on animal rights, this book is also a considered and imaginative evaluation of moral theory as explored through the issue of animal rights.

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

In this 2nd edition the author has substantially revised his book throughout, updating the moral arguments and adding a chapter on animal minds. Importantly, rather than being a polemic on animal rights, this book is also a considered and imaginative evaluation of moral theory as explored through the issue of animal rights.

There is a new way of thinking about the mind that does not locate mental processes exclusively "in the head." Some think that this expanded conception of the mind will be the basis of a new science of the mind. In this book, leading philosopher Mark Rowlands investigates the conceptual foundations of this new science of the mind. The new way of thinking about the mind emphasizes the ways in which mental processes are embodied (made up partly of extraneural bodily structures and processes), embedded (designed to function in tandem with the environment), enacted (constituted in part by action), and extended (located in the environment). The new way of thinking about the mind, Rowlands writes, is actually an old way of thinking that has taken on new form. Rowlands describes a conception of mind that had its clearest expression in phenomenology -- in the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. He builds on these views, clarifies and renders consistent the ideas of embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended mind, and develops a unified philosophical treatment of the novel conception of the mind that underlies the new science of the mind.

The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology

Bradford Books

An argument that activity provides a useful template for thinking about representation and that deeds are themselves representational: our representing of the world consists, in part, in certain sorts of deeds that we perform in the world.In  Body Language, Mark Rowlands argues that the problem of representation―how it is possible for one item to represent another―has been exacerbated by the assimilation of representation to the category of the word. That is, the problem is traditionally understood as one of relating inner to outer―relating an inner representing item to something extrinsic or exterior to it. Rowlands argues that at least some cases of representation need to be understood not in terms of the word but of the deed. Activity, he claims, is a useful template for thinking about representation; our representing the world consists, in part, in certain sorts of actions that we perform in that world. This is not to say simply that these forms of acting can facilitate representation but that they are themselves representational. These sorts of actions―which Rowlands calls deeds―do not merely express or re-present prior intentional states. They have an independent representational status. After introducing the notion of the deed as a "preintentional act," Rowlands argues that deeds can satisfy informational, teleological, combinatorial, misrepresentational, and decouplability constraints―and so qualify as representational. He puts these principles of representation into practice by examining the deeds involved in visual perception. Representing, Rowlands argues, is something we do in the world as much as in the head. Representing does not stop at the skin, at the border between the representing subject and the world; representing is representational "all the way out."

Body Language: Representation in Action (A Bradford Book)

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Books by Rowlands, Mark

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rowlands, Mark. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Everything I Know I Learned from TV: Philosophy for the Unrepentant Couch Potato

Everything I Know I Learned from TV: Philosophy for the Unrepentant Couch Potato

Can Animals Be Moral?

Memory and the Self: Phenomenology, Science and Autobiography

Can Animals Be Persons?

World on Fire: Humans, Animals, and the Future of the Planet

Animal Rights: Moral Theory and Practice

Animal Rights: Moral Theory and Practice

The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology

Body Language: Representation in Action (A Bradford Book)