Feline Philosophy

Cats and the Meaning of Life

De: John Gray

Narrado por: Neil Gardner

Brought to you by Penguin.

'When I play with my cat, how do I know she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?' Montaigne

There is no real evidence that humans ever 'domesticated' cats. Rather, it seems that at some point cats saw the potential value to themselves of humans. John Gray's wonderful new book is an attempt to get to grips with the philosophical and moral issues around the uniquely strange relationship between ourselves and these remarkable animals.

Feline Philosophy draws on centuries of philosophy, from Montaigne to Schopenhauer, to explore the complex and intimate links that have defined how we react to and behave with this most unlikely 'pet'.

At the heart of the book is a sense of gratitude towards cats as perhaps the species that more than any other - in the essential loneliness of our position in the world - gives us a sense of our own animal nature.

© John Gray 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Reseñas de la Crítica

The intellectual cat's pyjamas ... Gray's is the perfect book for the estranging oddness of the pandemic. (Tim Adams)

Why can't a human be more like a cat? That is the question threaded through this vivid patchwork of philosophy, fiction, history and memoir ... Feline Philosophy is a wonderful mixture of flippancy and profundity, astringency and tenderness, wit and lament. (Jane O'Grady)

Engaging, amusing, perceptive and untimely, in the most admirable Nietzschean sense. (Mark Rowlands)

An elegant philosophical study of the good life ... one of the most important thinkers alive ... It's a mark of the book's subtlety that you're not quite sure how seriously to take him. (James Marriott)

A scratching, spitting, and finally purring tour de force. (Will Self)

Random, directionless mishmash of philosophy and literature, unscientific, contradictory take on cats

Feels like the author googled the topic and found random philosophy and literature by thinkers who loved cats or wrote about them, then makes conjectures about cat biology and behaviour that is simply inaccurate. For example, he lost me when he posited that cats can experience trauma and forget it the next day, and that they are not neurotic in their attachments. I'm not even a cat person and know this to be inaccurate. Not a single citation to science. The context as to why he chose each writer or philosopher, why they are important, and the impact they had is left out, so we learn nothing about cats nor about philosophy. It's just a pretentious, fanciful, forgettable, long winded reminder to chill and practice detachment. It's also a rather cynical and pessimistic take on what makes us human and simplistic, outdated view of the complexity of animals and their neurology and biology. Sometimes it anthromorphasizes cats and other times characterizes them as being lower life forms like a paramecium, with no reference to the complex social worlds of their evolutionary ancestors.