
Mark Rowlands was born in Newport, Wales and began his undergraduate degree at Manchester University in engineering before changing to philosophy. He took his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University and has held various academic positions in philosophy in universities in Britain, Ireland and the US. His best known work is the book The Philosopher and the Wolf about a decade of his life he spent living and travelling with a wolf. As The Guardian described it in its review, "it is perhaps best described as the autobiography of an idea, or rather a set of related ideas, about the relationship between human and non-human animals." Reviews were very positive, the Financial Times said it was "a remarkable portrait of the bond that can exist between a human being and a beast,". Mark Vernon writing in The Times Literary Supplement "found the lessons on consciousness, animals and knowledge as engaging as the main current of the memoir," and added that it "could become a philosophical cult classic", while John Gray in the Literary Review thought it "a powerfully subversive critique of the unexamined assumptions that shape the way most philosophers - along with most people - think about animals and themselves." However, Alexander Fiske-Harrison for Prospect warned that "if you combine misanthropy and lycophilia, the resulting hybrid, lycanthropy, is indeed interesting, but philosophically quite sterile" and that, although Rowlands "acknowledges at the beginning of the book that he cannot think like a wolf... for such a capable philosopher and readable author not to have made the attempt is indeed an opportunity missed." As a professional philosopher, Rowlands is known as one of the principal architects of the view known as vehicle externalism or the extended mind, and also for his work on the moral status of animals.
Series
Books

The New Science of the Mind
From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology
2010

Reputation
2008

A Good Life
Philosophy from Cradle to Grave
1852

Everything I Know I Learned from TV
Philosophy for the Unrepentant Couch Potato
2005

The Philosopher at the End of the Universe
2003

phantastisch! Ausgabe 38
2010

Animal Rights
All That Matters
2013

The Philosopher and the Wolf
Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death, and Happiness
2008

Running with the Pack
1666

Animals Like Us
2002

Can Animals Be Moral?
2012

The Word of Dog
What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life
2025

Animal Rights
Moral Theory and Practice
2008