Abstract

This is a biological approach to the philosophy of mind that feeds an investigation of the phenomena of “social” and “emotional”, both of which are widespread in nature. I scrutinize the non-dualistic Darwinian concept of the continuity of mind. For practical reasons, I address mind at different levels of organization: The systemic mind are the properties of which a common, coherent evolution works upon. Separated from this is “language-mind”: the crystallization of thought in words, which is a strictly human phenomenon. As the phenomenology of the body is a theory of philosophy that lie beyond language it can—to a certain extent—be extrapolated across a species boundary. In the process the phenomenology of the body comes to resemble biosemiotics and with this tool, I investigate a field study of social play behavior in canids. This leads to a possibility to study the non-human experience of emotion as “locally meaningful phenomena”