Feline Philosophy

John Grays most recent book is the highly praised Seven Types of Atheism: his other books include Straw Dogs Black Mass The Soul of the Marionette and The Silence of Animals. He has kept feline companions for over thirty years.The intellectual cats pyjamas ... Grays is the perfect book for the estranging oddness of the pandemic.Why cant 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.Engaging amusing perceptive and untimely in the most admirable Nietzschean sense.An elegant philosophical study of the good life ... one of the most important thinkers alive ... Its a mark of the books subtlety that youre not quite sure how seriously to take him.A scratching spitting and finally purring tour de force.Why cant a human be more like a cat? That is the question threaded through this vivid patchwork of philosophy fiction history and memoir ... a wonderful mixture of flippancy and profundity astringency and tenderness wit and lament Jane OGrady Daily TelegraphWhen I play with my cat how do I know she is not passing time with me rather than I with her? MontaigneThere 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 Grays 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.GB