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Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life
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About This Book
The author of Straw Dogs , famous for his provocative critiques of scientific hubris and the delusions of progress and humanism, turns his attention to cats — and what they reveal about humans' torturous relationship to the world and to themselves. The history of philosophy has been a predictably tragic or comical succession of palliatives for human disquiet. Thinkers from Spinoza to Berdyaev have pursued the perennial questions of how to be happy, how to be good, how to be loved, and how to live in a world of change and loss. But perhaps we can learn more from cats--the animal that has most captured our imagination--than from the great thinkers of the world. In Feline Philosophy , the philosopher John Gray discovers in cats a way of living that is unburdened by anxiety and self-consciousness, showing how they embody answers to the big questions of love and attachment, mortality, morality, and the Montaigne's house cat, whose un-examined life may have been the one worth living; Meo, the Vietnam War survivor with an unshakable capacity for "fearless joy"; and Colette's Saha, the feline heroine of her subversive short story "The Cat" , a parable about the pitfalls of human jealousy. Exploring the nature of cats, and what we can learn from it, Gray offers a profound, thought-provoking meditation on the follies of human exceptionalism and our fundamentally vulnerable and lonely condition. He charts a path toward a life without illusions and delusions, revealing how we can endure both crisis and transformation, and adapt to a changed scene, as cats have always done.
Reviews
"Gray moves freely among writing modes, including several of the potted biographies that are common to popular works of philosophy."
"His wide reading yields lovely digressions in the company of Colette, Patricia Highsmith and Mary Gaitskill, among others."
"This time he makes reference to essays by Mary Gaitskill, Pascal and Montaigne, among others, and reflects on some cat-centric fiction by Patricia Highsmith and Colette."
"Even more impressive, it has readers seriously consider radical ideas ..."
"More to the point, books such as Feline Philosophy exist because we cannot help scratching at the itch of consciousness."
"this intermittently witty and intriguing work likely won't be enough to keep cat-loving readers from prowling elsewhere for more satisfying insight into their four-legged companions."
"And you know Gray: whenever he sees someone clinging to an illusion he goes and stamps on their fingers ..."
"For philosophers and philosophical cat lovers."
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