122 Guest of the Issue AVANT Volume III, Number 1/2012 www.avant.edu.pl/en 123 Mark Rowlands AVANT editors and co-workers had a chance to meet Mark Rowlands in Toruń, Poland a year ago in 2011. He gave two talks at Philosophers’ Rally , the first one on “Intentionality and the Extended Mind” (involving the discus- sion of his latest book The New Science of The Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology, 2010) and the second – less formal, on his The Philosopher and the Wolf (2008) me- moirs. Professor Rowlands is certainly a man of many (philosophical) interests. His works may be divided into three cate- gories: the philosophy of the mind and cognitive science (starting from Super- venience and Materialism (1995) and The Nature Of Consciousness (2001), followed by the 2006 and 2010 books already mentioned), ethics, the moral status of non- human animals and problems of natural environment (Animal Rights (1998), The Environmental Crisis (2000) and Animals Like Us (2002)), and broadly construed cultural criticism and philosophy 101-style books (The Philosopher at the End of the Universe (2003), Everything I Know I Learned from TV (2005) and Fame (2008)). Rowland’s article Representing without Representations published in this issue is related to his earlier book, Body Language (2006). Mark Rowlands is currently the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. He began his academic career with an undergraduate degree in engineering at the University of Manchester and then switched to philosophy. He was awarded his PhD in philosophy at the University of Oxford. Apart from his official publications, he runs his own blog, found at rowlands.philospot.com and remains active on aca- demia.edu, where his recent papers can be found (see: miami.academia.edu/Mark Rowlands ). Mark Rowlands's website: www.markrowlandsauthor.com/ and blog: http://rowlands.philospot.com/ Jakub R. Matyja Picture source: Mark Rowlands's archives. 124 Guest of the Issue Of wolves and Philosophers Interview with Mark Rowlands Tadeusz Ciecierski If wolves were capable of philosophizing what would be their favorite philo- sophical method and/or theory? I’m afraid I have no idea. I think the question has moved so far from the actual world that I have no idea of what an answer would even look like. Relatively recently your book The Philosopher and the Wolf was translated into Polish. It has received very good reviews. However, when reading the book, one cannot get rid of the impression that the picture of human nature sketched in it is – euphemistically speaking – not very positive. Do you really think that there are so few truly admirable things about human nature? It’s nice to hear the reviews were good. Yes, I think it’s fair to say that I didn’t dwell for very long on the human virtues. But, of course, there is no shortage of humans who are wiling to extol the virtues of human beings. Much of the history of human thought has concerned itself with these things. There are comparatively few who have been willing to question these virtues, or point out our fairly obvious flaws, in any sustained or systematic way. So, the book was, in part, an attempt to redress the balance. But, if you read between the lines of the book, it actually presupposes, rather than denies, that humans have many admirable qualities. In fact, I argued that some of our most impressive qualities – in particular, our intelligence and our moral sense – can evolve out of some of our worst qualities. I think Nietzsche once claimed that what is best about us comes from what is worst. The Philosopher and the Wolf car- ries on this theme. That is, the project was not so much to deny the admirable qual- ities of humans, but to dig down into the roots of those qualities and see what we find. AVANT Volume III, Number 1/2012 www.avant.edu.pl/en 125 Various considerations included in the book are described by you as attempts of calling into question parts of „the mythology of the ape” - consisting of, among other things, a certain idea of happiness. Do you have any positive eth- ical or anthropological proposal hidden behind the revaluation of the myth in question? The philosophical focus of the book was provided by the stories we tell to distin- guish ourselves from, and elevate ourselves above, other animals. I wasn’t really concerned with the truth or falsity of these stories, but with what our acceptance of them revealed about us. There is, as far as I am aware, no hidden positive ethi- cal or anthropological proposal. If you were asked to advertise your book to a possible reader – how would you do that? When I was twenty-seven, I did something really rather stupid. Actually, I almost certainly did many stupid things that year – I was, after all, twenty-seven – but this is the only one I remember because it went on to indelibly shape the future course of my life. When I first met Brenin, I was a young assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama, and he was six-week old, a cuddly little teddy bear of a cub. He was sold to me as a wolf, but I all likelihood he was a wolf-dog mix. Whatever he was, he grew up, and with this came various, let us call them, idiosyn- crasies . If I left him unattended for more than a few minutes, he would destroy anything he could lay his jaws on – which, given that he grew to be thirty-five inches at the withers, included pretty much everything that wasn’t screwed to the ceiling. I don’t know if he was easily bored, had separation anxiety, or claustro- phobia, or some combination of all of these things. But the result was that Brenin had to go everywhere I did. Any socializing I did – bars, parties, and so on – Brenin had to come too. If I went on a date, he would play the lupine gooseberry. I took him to lectures with me at the University. He would lie down and sleep in the cor- ner of the lecture room: most of the time anyway – when he didn’t things would get interesting. I mean, you can probably imagine the circumstances that caused me to append this little cautionary note to my syllabus: NOTE : Please do not pay any attention to the wolf. He will not hurt you. However, if you do have any food in your bags, please ensure that those bags are securely fastened shut. As a result of having to share a life with a rootless and restless philosopher, Brenin became not only a highly educated wolf – the recipient of more free university education than any wolf that ever lived – but also, I suppose, a rather cosmopolitan wolf, moving with me from Alabama to Ireland, on to Wales, England, and finally to France. 126 Guest of the Issue The Philosopher and the Wolf is the story of those years we spent together. But it is also a philosophical examination of the ways in which we differentiate ourselves from other animals – the stories we tell to convince ourselves of our superiority. Each story, I argued, has a dark side – each story casts a shadow. And in each case, what is most revealing is not the story itself, but the fact that we believe it and think it important. I focused on three common stories. The first is that we are better other animals because we are more intelligent. The second is that we are better because we have morality – we can understand right and wrong – and they do not. The third is that we are superior because we, and we alone, understand that we are going to die. Intelligence, morality and our sense of our own mortality were the three major themes of the book. I am far from convinced that any of these stories can establish or underwrite a critical gulf between us and other animals. But, in The Philosopher and the Wolf , I was more interested in what each story reveals about us. That is, I was interested in what our valuing of these things says about us. I argued that when we dig down far enough into the roots of each of these things, we find fea- tures of ourselves that are deeply unflattering. At the roots of our intelligence we find manipulation and machination. In the roots of our morality we find power and lies. And our sense of our mortality renders us fractured creatures, unable to understand ourselves in any satisfactory way. What can a philosopher learn from a wolf? Well, it is not as if a wolf can teach a philosopher anything directly. But, indirectly, as a result of living with Brenin, my life took on a certain shape, and as a result of this shape, my thought traveled down certain paths that, I suspect, it otherwise would not have traveled. That is the only sense in which I “learned” anything from Brenin. Do you believe that the ethics of respect for all sentient creatures can gain universal (or at least common) acceptance in the world we live in? My heart says yes, but my head tells me this is unlikely – certainly not in my life- time. Quite recently we had here in Poland a visit of Peter Singer who, like you, is perceived as an advocate of animal rights (or, more adequately: the rights of sentient creatures). Do you share his ethical views as well as their utilitarian foundations? AVANT Volume III, Number 1/2012 www.avant.edu.pl/en 127 Singer and I converge on many of our views on animals.