Ali Boyle: Mental Time Travel and the Harm of Death

Tuesday March 24 2026 @11:30 (CET)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
Several philosophers have influentially argued that animals are not harmed by death, or are harmed by it less than humans are, on the grounds that they lack cognitive connections to the future: they do not know about the future, have no desire to see it, have no projects extending into the future, and/or are not psychologically connected to their future selves. In support of such arguments, it is often claimed that animals lack capacities for ‘mental time travel’. Yet a growing empirical literature provides grounds for thinking that at least some animals do have mental time travel capacities. In this talk, I explore whether and how this evidence makes trouble for arguments about the harm of death to animals. 

Bio
Ali Boyle is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the LSE’s Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method. She works in the philosophy of science. Most of her research is about comparative cognitive science – the science of nonhuman minds, from animals to artificial agents. Her current project focusses on episodic memory, investigating its nature, functions, and distribution in the animal kingdom. She also works in the philosophy of biology, where she’s interested in how to count organisms in tricky cases like conjoined twinning, parasitism and pregnancy.