cognition evolution philosophy theoretical

books:

1 review

Oxford University Press, USA, 1998

Mind matters and some possible evolutionary pathways.
Offering an eclectic interdisciplinary review of thoughts on the evolution of mind, this volume provides ten provocative and well referenced essays from a range of perspectives. Most of the contributors provide discussions of species-comparative data and are sympathetic to some form of Darwinian evolutionary framework. However, although not always explicitly stated, only four of them allude to ...

The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition

1 review

The MIT Press, 2002

Occasionally Interesting
This book is a large collection of short papers, somewhat comparable in style to what you would get in a peer-reviewed journal. I found many of them dull, but a few were good enough to make the book worth buying. Slobodchikoff's paper on prairie dog speech is what attracted me to the book; it's interesting but doesn't say enough to provide a convincing answer to my questions about how ...

Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong

1 review
Wendell Wallach, Colin Allen

Oxford University Press, USA, 2008

"Moral Machines" and our impending new reality.
Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong We have been in uncharted waters for at least 94 years since 1914. Some few gifted observers have tried to explain the past, clarify the present, and glimpse the future. Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen have succeeded in giving us a cautionary and yet hopeful view of a future world that we are likely to be sharing with increasingly intelligent ...

Species of Mind: The Philosophy and Biology of Cognitive Ethology

2 reviews
Colin Allen, Marc Bekoff

The MIT Press, 1999

A great book (and a retraction of previous review)
When I read Species of Mind for the first time it was my introduction to the topic of cognitive ethology and I had no background at all in this area. I wrote a review here indicating that I did not get anything out of it. I would like to retract that. What would have been more accurate would have been that I did not appreciate it because *I* was not prepared for it. I have since read extensively ...

Logic Primer - 2nd Edition

2 reviews
Colin Allen, Michael Hand

The MIT Press, 2001

Not Meant To Stand Alone
Had the previous reviewer bothered to read the preface to this text, he would have found that the book was meant to be used with an instructor: the first two sentences read, "The most important thing for you to know about this book is that it is designed to be used with a teacher. You should not expect to learn logic from this book alone..." Contra the previous review, I found this textbook ...

Nature's Purposes: Analyses of Function and Design in Biology

1 review

The MIT Press, 1998

Needed if you're going to write on functions...
This is an excellent anthology if you are beginning to do research on functions, or just any research in the philosophy of biology. It has many classic papers, and is balanced in point of view-- overall, a great starting place.