Cat play article now freely available online

My 2009 article "Abstraction, cruelty and other aspects of animal play (exemplified by the playfulness of Muki and Maluca)", published in Sign Systems Studies, is now freely available online as PDF download.

Causerie on play published in Norwegian magazine

A short text by me, written upon invitation, has been published on the Norwegian Christian magazine Kors:vei [literally "cross-road", or "stations of the cross"], in its #2/2013 (page 4). Titled "Om lek og blodig alvor" [On play and /bloody seriousness/], it treats play as the origin of cooperation and what is much worse. A couple of references are made to observations described in more academic fashion in my academic journal article "Abstraction,Cruelty and Other Aspects of Animal Play (Exemplified By the Playfulness of Muki and Maluca)" (Sign Systems Studies 37(3/4): 558-579).

The whole text - in Norwegian - is posted in my Norwegian-language blog Utopisk Realisme.

Sign Systems Studies

The zoosemiotics special issue of Sign Systems Studies (no. 37.3/4) has now appeared (or, rather, been referred to) on its homepage. A complete list of contents is to be found here.

Selected articles:

Dario Martinelli: Introduction

Otto Lehto: Studying the cognitive states of animals: Epistemology, ethology and ethics
Karel Kleisner, Marco Stella: Monsters we met, monsters we made: On the parallel emergence of phenotypic similarity under domestication

Helena Telkänranta: Conditioning or cognition? Understanding interspecific communication as a way of improving animal training (a case study with elephants in Nepal
Morten Tønnessen: Abstraction, cruelty and other aspects of animal play(exemplified by the playfulness of Muki and Maluca)
Elina Vladimirova: Sign activity of mammals as means of ecological adaptation
Carlo Brentari: Konrad Lorenz’s epistemological criticism towards Jakob von Uexküll

A list of all published articles 1998-2006 (including two by me) rests here.

Bibliographical data for animal play article

Final title: "Abstraction, cruelty and other aspects of animal play (exemplified by the playfulness of Muki and Maluca)"

To be published (available by January) in Sign Systems Studies 37(3/4), 2009, pp. 205-223 (19 pp).