Cetacean Philosophy

A Book Review

Alessandra Strasser and SWID-0293 (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Cetacean Philosophy, Volume 1: Sperm Whale Metaphysics and Epistemology, Oxford and Phoenix: Oxford University Press/CostCo, 2029, 791 pp.

“We have now obtained reliable evidence that [sperm whales], too, are soniferous.” —Val Worthington and William Schevill, 1957

1.

Let me begin by reminding the reader that I make no secret of my belonging to that camp of scholars who maintain that it is a grave theoretical mistake, and likely an equally grave ethical breach, to attempt to render into familiar human categories the conceptual world, to the extent that we are yet able to understand it, of the sperm whales.

That they have a conceptual world, and a deep knowledge of their own history, of their current predicament in a world shared with human beings, of their own mortal destinies as individual beings and of their own fragile existence as a species — of this we can no longer have any doubt. But that all of this can be expressed in the familiar terms of our own fine-grained subdisciplinary divisions, which in some cases are only a few decades old (see for example Cornelia Raluca Szász’s chapter on “Sperm Whale Philosophy of Action”, or Ron Kumpe’s “Sperm Whale Philosophy of Sport and Leisure”), seems to me not only to fall woefully short of the volume’s own stated goal —providing “as full and rich an introduction as possible of the totality of theoretical articulations among the sperm whales of their own understanding of their place in the world, of their nature as social and reflective beings, of their representation of the structure of the world and its ultimate causes, their values and ideals as expressed in their social life, as well as their conception of ◑○●́●̂◉●̀ [which the editors rather inadequately render throughout as “beauty”¹]”— but also to betray the delicate interspecies compact we have worked so hard to establish with the sperm whales ever since direct dialogue with them, mediated by AI, became possible in late 2025.

The opening codas of ◉ ● ○̃ ○ ●̂ ●̀ ○́ ●̈ ○̃ ● (c. 11th millennium BCE), considered the foundational work of sperm whale metaphysics (transcribed in “Grebe Notation”).

Of course there are individual sperm whales who have, at least according to most interpretations, given their explicit consent to this project, and we do not doubt in particular SWID-0293’s² integrity and honesty in her willingness to participate as “co-editor” (in what appears to be mostly an honorary role), even as other elders politely —and on occasion, we must acknowledge, impolitely— declined similar invitations extended by Strasser and her team, on the grounds that, as SWID(P)-1452 famously clicked before slapping her tail fin on the ocean’s surface and plunging into the great dark depth to hunt some giant squid: “a cachalot has no need of books” [●̃ ◉ ○ ○̂ ●̀ ●́ ◉ ○̈ ○̂ ◐○̃ ●].³

But even without calling SWID-0293’s integrity into doubt we may still wonder whether her role as a mediator between the two communities has really enabled the human beings involved to come to anything like a reliable account of what they insist on calling rather grandiosely “cetacean philosophy”. As some readers will know, it was in view of such doubts as I am expressing here that I myself did not take part in the project, even though I was PI on the first research team to have successfully proven, in a paper published in August, 2025, that sperm whale clicks do indeed exhibit that key power of syntactic recursion that for so long linguists had taken to be uniquely present in human language.

Sperm whales, we now know, thanks to my team’s work, do have language, not in any figurative or reduced sense, but in the very fullest possible meaning of the word (I am not at all convinced of the recursive quality of Balaenoptera “song”, by contrast, though OUP/CostCo appears to be going ahead anyway with its plans to bring out Volume 2 of Cetacean Philosophy, on “Blue Whale Value Theory and Metaethics”, in early 2031).⁴ And they are using that language to generate novel propositions at every turn, to delight in their creative power and individual style, to take off on flights of dizzying abstraction, and to reconfirm, through recitation of memorized “classics”, their groundedness in ancient tradition. It will take considerably more time, however, for us to make any significant progress in really understanding what they are saying at all, and until we do it seems to me not only premature, but irresponsible and indeed unethical, to leap to any conclusions about what they are saying in such narrowly defined domains of distinctly human linguistic endeavor as “metaphysics” or “epistemology” — not to mention “philosophy of sport and leisure”!

Nonetheless, now that I have aired my significant reservations, allow me to turn to the work itself, and to try to address it, as charitably as possible, on its own terms. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that there is such a thing as “cetacean philosophy”. What do we know about it so far? What are the whales thinking?