Organisers
This workshop is organised by the Foundations of Animal Sentience (ASENT) project at the London School of Economics:
Dr Jonathan Birch is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the LSE and Principal Investigator (PI) on the Foundations of Animal Sentience project. In addition to his interest in animal sentience, cognition and welfare, he also has a longstanding interest in the evolution of altruism and social behaviour. His book on this topic, The Philosophy of Social Evolution, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. In 2014, he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize, which recognize “the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising”.
Simon Brown is a postdoctoral researcher on the project 'Foundations of Animal Sentience', where he is primarily working on consciousness in other animals. Originally from the UK, he earned his PhD from Columbia University in the City of New York in 2020 under the supervision of Christopher Peacocke, and then was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Foundations of Mind in the Departments of Philosophy and of Psychology and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in the USA. His main research interests lie in philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy of mind, focusing on consciousness, memory, intertemporal decision-making, and the representation of time in non-human animals, and he is also interested in the ethical implications of these issues.
Dr Andrew Crump is a postdoctoral biologist fascinated by questions like: Which animals are sentient? Why did sentience evolve? What does sentience mean for welfare? In the lab, he uses bees as a test-case to identify cognitive indicators of animal sentience. Andrew also works part-time as a Lecturer in Animal Cognition and Welfare at the Royal Veterinary College. Before joining the ASENT project, he completed a PhD at Queen’s University Belfast, exploring how human activity affects animal cognition and emotion.
Katariina Hynninen is a PhD student in the Foundations of Animal Sentience Project, and her background is in philosophy and biology. Katariina did her BA in Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, and wrote her bachelor’s thesis about Descartes’ view of animal sentience and consciousness. She then did a MSc in Aquatic Biology at Hólar University, where she wrote her master’s thesis about the vocalized communication of killer whales. As a part of her master’s degree she also studied animal law at Aarhus University, and environmental law and biodiversity at the University of Akureyri. Katariina is interested in animal communication, language and evolutionary biology, especially in the vocalizing behaviour and communication of killer whales, and what may be inferred from their vocalizations about their sentience, cognitive capacities and emotions, lives and culture.
Eva Read is a PhD student in the Foundations of Animal Sentience project. She has an MSc in Animal Behaviour from the University of Exeter and a BSc in Animal Behaviour and Welfare from the University of Plymouth. Unsatisfied with current definitions of animal welfare, her research focuses on how we might better understand this concept. She is also interested in animal welfare science as a discipline, namely its aims, constraints, and relationship to policy. Additional interests are the extent of sentience across the animal kingdom, what a proliferation of sentience means for our obligations to sentient beings, and motivating peace and humility in our approach to them.
Daria Zakharova is a PhD student in the Foundations of Animal Sentience Project. She has an MA in Philosophy from Humboldt University Berlin, with part of her masters spent abroad at King’s College London, where she studied philosophy of biology, scientific epistemology, AI ethics, and philosophy of mind. She obtained a BA degree from the Free University Berlin in Social Anthropology and Philosophy, developing an interest in philosophy of science and epistemology. Her main research interests are in philosophy of cognition, mind and science. Daria's current work is in the area of embedded embodiment in AI and biological cognition, and its implications for both artificial and non-human animal sentience, and conceptions of different kinds of intelligence. She is also interested in explanations of intelligent behaviour in different non-human animals, such as e.g., Portia spiders, theories of consciousness and AI ethics.
For enquiries about the workshop, please contact Simon at simonabbrown@gmail.com