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Work on minimal cognition raises a variety of questions concerning the boundaries of cognition. Many discussions of minimal cognition assume that the domain of minimal cognition is a subset of the domain of the living. In this article, I consider whether non-living ‘active materials’ ought to be included as instances of minimal cognition. I argue that seeing such cases as ‘minimal models’ of (minimal) cognition requires recognising them as members of a class of systems sharing the same basic features and exhibiting the same general patterns of behaviour. Minimal cognition in this sense is a very inclusive concept: rather than specifying some threshold level of cognition or a type of cognition found only in very simple systems, it is a concept of cognition associated with very minimal criteria that pick out only the most essential requirements for a system to exhibit cognitive behaviour.

This special issue highlights the growing interdisciplinary interest in minimal cognition, bringing together a number of philosophers and scientists interested in investigating where, how, and why cognition arises. In what follows, we introduce the topic of minimal cognition by giving a brief look at debates and discussions about the lower bounds of cognition, minimally cognitive behaviors, and the possibility of life-mind continuity. Afterwards, we offer a short summary of each of the contributions to this issue. In the spirit of the Minimal Cognition conferences at the University of Wollongong at which the contributors participated, we hope this special issue will enrich the current state of minimal cognition research by putting a number of different disciplines and approaches into conversation.

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What is the relationship between harm and disease? Discussions of the relationship between harm and disease typically suffer from two shortcomings. First, they offer relatively little analysis of the concept of harm itself, focusing instead on examples of clear cases of harm such as death and dismemberment. This makes it difficult to evaluate such accounts in borderline cases, where the putative harms are less severe. Second, they assume that harm-based accounts of disease must be understood normatively rather than naturalistically, in the sense that they are inherently value based. This makes such accounts vulnerable to more general objections of normative accounts of disease. Here we draw on an influential account of harm from the philosophy of law to develop a harm-based account of disease that overcomes both of these shortcomings.