ABSTRACT
My ingression into the philosophical questions raised by animal ethics and animal mind took place in virtue of both theoretical and practical issues pressed upon me in the mid-1970s. On the theoretical level, I had been teaching history of philosophy for many years, and was struck by how little attention philosophers paid to the moral status of animals, even as they regularly developed arcane proofs that time was unreal, motion was impossible, and the world was an unchanging Plenum; and they engaged questions of whether the Absolute was happy or not, whether the mind exists in the brain or the brain exists in the mind, and so on.
