If you have spent any part of your life with a dog, you may have found certain questions popping, unbidden, into your mind: Is my dog living a fulfilled life? Is my dog a good dog? Does my dog love me? Addressing these questions compels you to confront not just your dog's life but yours as well--to think about what fulfillment, and meaning, in life really is.

In The Word of Dog, philosopher Mark Rowlands explores these questions and suggests that in dogs we can see hints--faint, shrouded, but discernible--of what a better way of living might look like. Perhaps none of us can be happy in the way a dog can, but The Word of Dog shows us we could do a lot better than we're doing simply by listening to the unspoken wisdom our dogs reveal to us every day of their happy, uncomplicated lives.

Do animals have moral standing? Do they count, morally speaking? In Animal Rights, Mark Rowlands argues that they do and explores the implications of this idea. He identifies three different waves in animal rights writing. The first wave was defined by a traditional dispute between utilitarianism (represented by Peter Singer) and rights-based approaches (represented by Tom Regan) to ethics. The second wave was defined by an expansion in a conception of ethics, which saw utilitarian and rights-based approaches supplemented by other ethical traditions, including contractualism, virtue ethics, and care ethics. The third wave was defined by an expansion in our conception of animals, driven by exciting new developments in the field of comparative psychology.

Each of these waves had ramifications for how we understand the moral status of animals, but, this book argues, and reinforces, the core idea that animals deserve moral respect. In earlier waves, discussions of animal ethics had been focused on the issue of animal suffering. But the third wave is defined by the idea that animals are far more than merely sufferers or enjoyers of experiences but are instead authors of their own lives: creatures capable of choosing how to live, shaped by a conception of their life and how they would like it to go. Rowlands writes that, no matter what moral theory you choose, the most plausible version of that theory entails that animals have moral standing and that our obligations to them are far more substantial than many of us care to acknowledge.

Mark Rowlands was a young philosophy professor, rootless and searching for life s greater meaning. Shortly after arriving at the University of Alabama, he noticed a classified ad in the local paper advertising wolf cubs for sale, and decided he had to investigate, if only out of curiosity. It was love at first sight, and the bond that grew between philosopher and wolf reaffirms for us the incredible relationships that exist between man and animal. When Mark welcomed his new companion, Brenin, into his home, but more than just an exotic pet, Brenin exerted an immense influence on Rowlands both as a person, and, strangely enough, as a philosopher, leading him to reevaluate his attitude toward love, happiness, nature, death, and the true meaning of companionship.

Mark Rowlands claims that it is simply unjust to harm animals. A 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.

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.

Rowlands 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.

With World on Fire, Mark Rowlands identifies the source of our environmental ills and provides a compelling and accessible account of how to solve them.

In this revelatory and intimate exploration of the way memory works, Mark Rowalds, author of The Philosopher and the Wolf, reveals how memories aren't fixed. They soften and consolidate--and are distorted--each time we revisit them, even those memories most deeply engrained. The way we call on memory is closer to a negotiation with the past.

From episodic memories like shining islands in dark waters and forgotten Rilkean memories that underpin our personalities and essential style to the memories we might hold that have been authored by others close to us, The Book of Memory draws on philosophical argument, a range of writers and thinkers, the latest neurological research, and psychology experiments to chart how memories are made, lost and remembered, with important consequences for how we understand ourselves.

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.

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.

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.

Sci-Phi demonstrates how anyone can grasp the basic concepts of philosophy while still holding a bucket of popcorn. Mark Rowlands makes philosophy utterly relevant to our everyday lives and reveals its most potent messages using nothing more than a little humor and the plotlines of some of the most spectacular, expensive, high-octane films on the planet.

Learn about: The Nature of Reality from The Matrix, Good and Evil from Star Wars, Morality from Aliens, Personal Identity from Total Recall, The Mind-Body dilemma from Terminator, Free Will from Minority Report, Death and the Meaning of Life from Blade Runner, and much more. A search for knowledge about ourselves and the world around us with a star-studded cast that includes: Tom Cruise, Plato, Harrison Ford, Immanuel Kant, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigourney Weaver, Rene? Descartes, and Keanu Reeves.

Rowlands anchors his discussions in easily understood everyday terms and relates them in a manner easy to identify with. Interspersed with a ready joke or two, he wonderfully explains why those SciFi movies we love so much are much deeper than they appear to be on the surface. Mark Rowlands's entertaining and stimulating guide is perfect for anyone searching for knowledge of the world around us.

If Keanu can understand Descartes surely everyone can.

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.