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"Rowlands, Mark."
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The philosopher and the wolf : lessons from the wild on love, death and happiness
This text charts the relationship between Mark Rowlands, a restless philosopher, & Brenin, his well-travelled wolf. Far more than just an exotic pet, Brenin exerted an immense influence on Rowlands as both a person & as a philosopher. He led Rowlands to re-evaluate his attitude to love, happiness, mortality, nature & death.
Book
Superdupersizing the mind: extended cognition and the persistence of cognitive bloat
The hypothesis of extended cognition (EC) contends that parts of the world outside of the head partly comprise the vehicles of representation and mind. I consider and reject recent efforts to defend EC from the problem of \"cognitive bloat.\"
Journal Article
Is there a Rawlsian Argument for Animal Rights?
Mark Rowlands defends a Rawlsian argument for animal rights, according to which animals have rights because we would assign them rights when deciding on the principles of morality from behind a veil of ignorance. Rowlands's argument depends on a non-standard interpretation of the veil of ignorance, according to which we cannot know whether we are human or non-human on the other side of the veil. Rowlands claims that his interpretation of the veil is more consistent with a core commitment of Rawlsian justice—the intuitive equality principle—than either Rawls or his critics realize. Here I argue that Rawls is not committed to the intuitive equality principle, as Rowlands articulates it, and hence Rowlands's argument is in fact only superficially Rawlsian. Furthermore, Rowlands's intuitive equality principle is dubious on its own terms, and thus a poor principle on which to base a case for animal rights.
Journal Article
Fame
Once a title held only by a privileged few, fame went hand-in-hand with respect and hard work. To be famous meant that you had achieved something noteworthy, or had an exceptional talent. But things have changed, as demonstrated by the number of singularly untalented people who are currently famous. Why has there been such a shift in our notion of fame and why has the desire for fame become such a powerful motivation for so many people? Mark Rowlands brings his philosophical expertise to bear on our concept of fame and explores the reasons behind its radical transformation. To understand this \"new variant fame\", Rowlands argues, we must engage in an extensive philosophical excavation that takes us back to a dispute that began in fourth-century BC Athens. Rowlands reveals that our presentday notion of fame and the extremes that accompany it are symptoms of a significant cultural change: the decline of Enlightenment ideas has seen individualism eclipse objectivism about value, so much so that what characterizes Western society today is its constitutional inability to distinguish quality from bullshit. This, argues Rowlands, is the predicament in which we find ourselves today and which explains how fame can now be unconnected with any discernible distinction: we have lost any grip on the idea that there might be objective standards of evaluation even for some of the most important choices we make. A fascinating mix of amusing anecdote and serious philosophical reflection, Fame presents us with a new way of looking at and understanding fame as we now know it, one that shows us how and why we have become the fame-hungry people we are today. It is a book written for anyone who has wondered how the world could ever have turned out like this.
eBook
Nussbaum’s Critique of Rawls on Animals
In this paper, I will reconstruct and evaluate Martha Nussbaum’s critique of John Rawls on the political status of nonhuman animals. Nussbaum’s criticisms go beyond pointing out the inadequacy of Rawls’s own view on the issue of nonhuman animals. Rather, she thinks that the Rawlsian social contract cannot plausibly be used to adequately construe humans as having duties of justice to nonhuman animals. I will review attempts in the secondary literature on Rawls and nonhuman animals that are most relevant to Nussbaum’s criticisms and argue that there are plausible resources to defend Rawls against these objections, at least in terms of the possibility of his theory being modified to go beyond his own view in a helpful way. The conclusion is that Nussbaum’s arguments are not decisive against Rawls, so her own theory will be a rival rather than a nonrival to the Rawlsian social contract tradition on the issue of duties of justice to nonhuman animals. Even so, the theories can be allies in advocating for animal rights.
Journal Article
Animal Ethics Based on Friendship: An Aristotelian Perspective
This article examines Aristotle's views concerning the possibility of friendship between human beings and nonhuman animals. The suggestion that he denies this possibility is rejected. I reassess the textual evidence adduced by scholars in support of this reading, while adding new material for discussion. Central to the traditional reading is the assumption that animals, in Aristotle's view, cannot be friends in virtue of their cognitive limitations. I argue that Aristotle's account of animal cognition is perfectly consistent with the possibility of friendship between human beings and nonhuman animals.
Journal Article
Rowlands, Rawlsian Justice and Animal Experimentation
Mark Rowlands argues that, contrary to the dominant view, a Rawlsian theory of justice can legitimately be applied to animals. One of the implications of doing so, Rowlands argues, is an end to animal experimentation. I will argue, contrary to Rowlands, that under a Rawlsian theory there may be some circumstances where it is justifiable to use animals as experimental test subjects (where the individual animals are benefited by the experiments).
Journal Article
CORRECTION
A story in Wednesday's Metro section on a former Mundelein seminary student being sentenced to probation reported incorrectly the charges to which Mark Rowlands pleaded guilty in July. He pleaded guilty to attempted impersonating a police officer and unlawful use of a weapon.
Newsletter
A Good Life: Philosophy from Cradle to Grave review -- daringly original
The conceit also helps [Mark Rowlands] to develop his ideas about the importance of anachronism in understanding a human life. [Myshkin]'s text is littered with chronological anomalies, which [Nicolai] always picks up on. The central idea here is that if our identities are forged through memory, and memory is unreliable, then who we are is essentially defined by a series of anachronisms. It is not what we actually do but how we understand it that makes us who we are. The book's weakness is that it only vaguely, rather than closely, approximates literature. The characters' names may allude to ones in Dostoevsky's The Idiot but the comparisons end there. Novelists show, but for the most part Rowlands's characters merely tell. Fortunately, however, Rowlands is an excellent communicator of philosophy and so the discussions he gives to Myshkin, Nicolai and [Olga] are all well worth reading. The range of topics covered touches on all that is important to a good life: religion, love, our treatment of animals, autonomy, love. He often manages to sum up paragraphs with the kind of pithy aphorism that makes you stop and take stock, such as \"pessimism almost always comes down on the side of the status quo\", and \"Compassion without calculation may be blind. But calculation without compassion is empty.\"
Newspaper Article