Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death

Join us as author Susana Monsó presents her book Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death.

Susana Monsó is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Logic, History and Philosophy of Science at the National Distance Education University (UNED) in Madrid.

Blending philosophical insight with new evidence from behavioral science and comparative psychology, Playing Possum dispels the anthropocentric biases that cloud our understanding of the natural world, and reveals that, when it comes to death and dying, we are just another animal.

Bring your questions on this topic and enjoy a philosophical evening with the author.

Playing Possum is an unexpected mix of witty and grisly, cerebral and earthy. Monsó doesn’t so much answer questions about death as raise new ones, encouraging us to shed our reflexive anthropocentrism by paying close attention to what animals do, even when it fails to accord with human modes of behavior."---Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

"Playing Possum identifies a new discipline: comparative thanatology, the study of 'how animals react to individuals who are dead or close to dying, the physiological processes that underlie their reactions, and what these behaviors tell us about the minds of animals.' . . . Monsó is tender-hearted in her empathic descriptions but hard-headed when it comes to interpreting what an animal might be experiencing."---David P. Barash, Wall Street Journal.

"A lively new book. . . . A sometimes moving, occasionally funny, and always considered treatise on whether animals understand death—and what that even means."---David Scharfenberg, Boston Globe.

Playing Possum represents a major contribution to comparative thanatology."---Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker.