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The Philosopher's Dog (Hardcover)

by Raimond Gaita (Author)
3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
RRP: £30.00
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 224 pages
  • Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (27 Feb 2003)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0415309077
  • ISBN-13: 978-0415309073
  • Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 14.2 x 3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 784,200 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

Author of the immensely readable The Philosopher's Dog, Raimond Gaita is Professor of Moral Philosophy at King's College London and Professor of Philosophy at Australian Catholic University. His previous publications include the prize-winning biography of his father, Romulus, My Father and A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love and Truth and Justice.

The Philosopher's Dog is a mixture of storytelling, mostly about Gaita's own, and his father's, relationship with their domestic pets, and philosophical reflections on the stories he tells.

The stories are about animals and their character: about Jack the cockatoo, Orloff, Zac and Gypsy the dogs, about cats, spiders, butterflies, about his father’s love and care for bees and his antipathy for insects. All are fascinating and touching stories in themselves. But more than this, Gaita's aim is to bring philosophy and story-telling together without turning the stories into long-winded philosophical examples and without compromising the philosophy for the sake of a good story.

The stories are used as a way in to philosophical questions about what it means to be a creature, about animal and human "consciousness", God, dignity, youth, old age, the relationship between science, philosophy and storytelling and about what it means to live an authentic individual life. A book such as this-–personal recollections of family pets, family members, autobiography and serious philosophy, would have been difficult to write because of the dangers of sliding into a self-regarding, self-indulgent, sentimental mode are obvious. What makes this highly unusual book such an immensely enjoyable read is the fact that Gaita is a gifted writer, a deeply sensitive, imaginative man as well as a profound philosopher. --Larry Brown



Big Issue, Australia

'An enchanting and pellucid meditation on animals... thoughtful, touching and utterly admirable.'
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The Philosopher's Dog
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The Philosopher's Dog 3.5 out of 5 stars (4)
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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.5 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars gaita's dog eats john gray's dog, 10 Jul 2003
By Robert THOMAS (london) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
A clear, passionate and sometimes whimsical discussion of human relations, through the lens of our relationship with animals.

Where John Gray's Straw Dogs confronts us with the unappeasable spectre of pessimistic skepticism via our animal nature and stops there, Gaita's book takes this position as a mere starting point. HIS philosophical dog just won't lie still...

After the first few pages you might think you are merely in for a bunch of sweet homely anecdotes about Gaita and his menagerie, but things soon get weighty, with a lovely take on Wittgenstein via an account of discussions with the author's daughter, plus several inspiring adventures in skepticism.

The weaker sections of the book, for me, were (my titles) 'Literature as Lebens-Philosophy' (too vague) and 'Rock-climbing as Existential Task' (like a philosopher's contribution to a mountaineers' monthly).

Reading this definitely made me interested in investigating his other works.

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Moving, Subtle Book, 21 Nov 2007
By G. G. Durante (Gibraltar) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Philosopher's Dog (Paperback)
Raimond Gaita, a moral philosopher by profession, has delivered a highly literary and, at times, abstract set of reflections on animals and our relations to them. Typically, Gaita proceeds by relating a touching anecdote or quoting another writer and uses these varied inspirations to launch deep, ruminative debates on what it means to be a human being - a creature that is at home in a wide, complex web of rich, morally relevant ties which extend to and include animals.

Gaita's general philosophical stance is Wittgensteinian. That is, he inquires into the applications of our concepts, unearths unquestioned assumptions, shuns all varieties of reductionism and, in the end, offers not a concrete thesis concerning man's relation to other beasts but a series of therapeutic reflections on particular problematic cases.

While I enjoyed the refreshing nature of his approach, at times I wished he would have committed himself to a specific overarching theory or principle - something graspable. Gaita dismantles many of the wrong-headed scientific debates concerning animal consciousness admirably but the few positive proposals hidden in the text never receive the more extensive development they clearly deserve.

Still, the book is genuinely thought-provoking and has passages of great depth and beauty which the committed reader will mull over for hours on end.
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3.0 out of 5 stars Shaggy dog philosophy, 26 Aug 2009
By Sporus (Yorkshire, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Philosopher's Dog (Paperback)
Gaita relates anecdotes about the animals (cockatoos, dogs and a cat) in his domestic life - much of it spent on a Australian farm with his Romanian dad - and muses on them using the tools of his trade (he's a professor of moral philosophy). I reckon the review here by GG Durante nails Gaita from a philosophical point of view, but his conclusions are more conventional than anything that Wittgenstein might have served up. His key notion is that there is a 'realm of meaning' where moral considerations should be contemplated rather than being dissected in technical terms. This is an appealing idea and justifies the comfortable prose style of the book; but the 'realm' isn't defined like - say - Gramschi's idea of 'common sense' and there are times when his assertions ("nobody REALLY feels this...") seem to be merely appeals to a cultural norm. In another age he'd have been arguing for the kind treatment of slaves, rather than against slavery itself. His attack on skepticism is similarly pleasing but fuzzy... which is curiously frustrating: a bit like watching your favourite team win a football game thanks to a poor decision by the referee. The mountaineering stuff is indeed weak (climbing enthusiasts never seem to realise how boring they are) and his determination not to be offensive (what does he honestly think of Coetzee's bizarre-yet-dull book 'The Lives of Animals'?) feels like a cop-out. I did like the chapter about pissing on spiders in urinals, though.
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