Marcin Urbaniak

In the fifty years since Donald Griffin’s groundbreaking publication, countless scientific papers have appeared on the ‘mental landscape’ (broadly interpreted) of various groups of animals other than humans. It is noticeable that as the number of publications has grown, so have controversies and theoretical debates, and advances in our understanding of animal minds continue to be called into question. In this article, I attempt to outline four key ways in which Griffin’s 1976 hypotheses have been both a challenge and an inspiration for the development of interdisciplinary animal cognition and comparative cognition. Griffinrepeatedly emphasises the potential value of communication with animals as a source of information about the mental experiences and states animals may possess, including states of consciousness, so these four challenges for contemporary interdisciplinary studies are also related to methodological issues relating to animal communication.

As Robert Toovey Walker notes, the multidimensional catastrophe is going to happen in 2064. The main aim of an article is to justify the standpoint that environmental and climate changes are so much calamitous its force some modifications of the native educational system, in the direction of reinterpretated environmental ethics anew. The necessity eventuates from – experienced by us – an ecological-social collapse which has got a deeper moral strand and which characterises modern age, called Anthropocene. In this strand, one is able to observe a ubiquitous lethargy and social indifference to happening catastrophe, as well as to the lack of systemwide, governmental activities, that could reduce for example emission of carbon dioxide, the devastation of water ecosystems or deforestation of green areas. Present article endeavors to answer the question how to adjust traditional, deeply anthropocentric ethical thought in order to save next generations against some consequences of an actual lack of climate responsibility as well as a lack of cross-generational and interspecies equity.