PAMBA Prize 2025

We are pleased to invite submissions for the PAMBA Prize essay in any area of the philosophy of animal minds. The winning essay will be published in Biology & Philosophy and the winner will be awarded an invitation to present the paper as a keynote talk at the PAMBA meeting in Santa Barbara, including a cash prize of $3000 CAD to offset travel costs. The paper must be under 10,000 words and meet the Biology & Philosophy submission guidelines.

The competition is open to early-career researchers, defined as PhD students or those who are within five years of receiving their PhDs (i.e., the PhD should have been received in January 2020 or later).

Submissions on all aspects of the philosophy of animal minds are welcome.

Please send submissions with the subject line "PAMBA Prize submission" to PAMBA.talk@gmail.com. For any questions, you can also send us an email at the same address.

The deadline is February 3, 2025.

PAMBA Prize

Announcing the PAMBA Prize 2023 winners:

Rhys Borchert (University of Arizona) and Aliya Dewey (University of Arizona)

“In Praise of Animals”

Borchert, R., Dewey, A.R. In praise of animals. Biol Philos 38, 24 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-023-09912-2

ABSTRACT: Reasons-responsive accounts of praiseworthiness say, roughly, that an agent is praiseworthy for an action if the reasons that explain why they acted are also the reasons that explain why the action is right. In this paper, we argue that reasons-responsive accounts imply that some actions of non-human animals are praiseworthy. Trying to exclude non-human animals, we argue, risks neglecting cases of inadvertent virtue in human action and undermining the anti-intellectualist commitments that are typically associated with reasons-responsive accounts. Of course, this could be taken as a reason to reject reasons-responsive accounts, rather than as a reason to attribute praiseworthiness to non-human animal action. We respond to two reasons that one might resist the implication that non-human animal action is praiseworthy. The first appeals to intuition: it’s too counterintuitive to attribute praiseworthiness to non-human animal action. In response, we argue that once the factors that determine an action’s praiseworthiness are disambiguated from the factors that determine whether an agent should be praised, the intuitive objection loses much of its force. The second appeals to empirical evidence: attributing praiseworthiness to non-human animal action involves a problematic kind of anthropomorphizing. First, we point out that this objection is mostly an a priori objection in a posteriori clothes: whether we give anthropomorphic vs. anthropectic explanations is a methodological choice, not an empirical one. Second, we argue that considerations from the cognitive modeling literature actually support anthropomorphic explanations over anthropectic explanations.

Honorable Mention to Giulia Palazzolo (University of Warwick) for her paper titled ‘A Case for Animal Reference: Beyond functional referentialism and meaning attribution’

The Philosophy of Animal Minds and Behavior Association (PAMBA) offers the PAMBA Prize for the best essay written by Early Career Researchers (early-career researchers, defined as PhD students or those who are within five years of receiving their PhDs) in any area of the Philosophy of Animal Minds.

The winning essay is published in Biology & Philosophy and the winner is invited to present the paper as a keynote talk at PAMBA meetings, with a travel bursary of up to $3000 CAD to cover costs.