Product Description: This work explores the relation of supervenience and attempts to use this relation in formulating a plausible version of mind-body materialism: the view that mental properties and events are in some sense physical. The study compares supervenient materialism with other forms of materialism...read more

Product Description: Pollution, deforestation, elimination of species, greenhouse gases, depletion of the ozone layer. These results of human activity are, as most people would agree, undesirable. But why? What is the value of the natural environment that would be lost if this environment were destroyed or seriously degraded? This is the central question of environmental ethics and the focus of this book...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Foot-and-mouth and mad-cow disease are but two of the results of treating animals as commodities, subject only to commercial constraints and ignoring all natural and moral considerations. Chickens hanging by their necks on conveyor belts, caged pigs with sores, bloated dead sheep with their legs in the air, mutilated dogs waiting to die after undergoing horrendous experiments in the name of science or just product-testing—these are some of the images that illustrate the indifference of a consumerist society to the suffering of animals. Few are willing to recognize that the packaged, sanitized supermarket meat that materializes on their dinner tables every day is the result of an industrial process involving unimaginable pain and suffering. We would be horrified if our pets were harmed, yet every day we eat animals that have been tortured and executed.Mark Rowlands claims that it is simply unjust to harm animals. As conscious, sentient beings, biologically continuous with humans, they have interests that cannot simply be disregarded. Using simple principles of justice, he argues that animals have moral rights, and examines the consequences of this claim in the contexts of vegetarianism, animal experimentation, zoos and hunting, and animal rights activism. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Book by Rowlands, Mark (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

An introduction to the basic concepts of philosophy as reflected in today's popular movies provides humorous observations on and insights into such films as The Matrix, Star Wars, and Terminator. 10,000 first printing.

An introduction to the basic concepts of philosophy as reflected in today's popular movies provides humorous observations on and insights into such films as The Matrix, Star Wars, and Terminator. Reprint.

This title 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.

Mark Rowlands develops an innovative and radical account of the nature of phenomenal consciousness, with significant consequences for attempts to find a place for it in the natural order. He argues that the phenomenal aspects of conscious experience are aspects that exist only in the directing of experience towards non-phenomenal objects, a theory that undermines reductive attempts to explain consciousness in terms of what is not conscious. His book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in the philosophy of mind and language, psychology, and cognitive science.

Product Description: In this book, Mark Rowlands challenges the Cartesian view of the mind as a self-contained monadic entity, and offers in its place a radical externalist or environmentalist model of cognitive processes. Drawing on both evolutionary theory and a detailed examination of the processes involved in perception, memory, thought and language use, Rowlands argues that cognition is, in part, a process whereby creatures manipulate and exploit relevant objects in their environment...read more

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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."

Product Description: 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...read more