num_pages: 128
description: 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.
language: English
title: Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux