Feline Philosophy
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  • Published: 2 November 2021
  • ISBN: 9780141988429
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $26.00

Feline Philosophy

Cats and the Meaning of Life

Formats & editions
Paperback
2 Nov 2021
EBook
29 Oct 2020
Audiobook
29 Oct 2020
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A playful yet profound examination of what cats can teach us about life and how to live it

'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 Gray's own wide reading to give fascinating examples of 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 the world - gives us a sense of our own animal nature.
  • Published: 2 November 2021
  • ISBN: 9780141988429
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $26.00
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About the author

John Gray

John Gray's most recent books are Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals , Al-Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern  and Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions. He is Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics.

Also by John Gray

Seven Types of Atheism
The Immortalization Commission
Beyond Mars and Venus
The Soul of the Marionette
Practical Miracles For Mars And Venus
The Silence of Animals
Gray's Anatomy
See all

Praise for Feline Philosophy

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

Tim Adams, The Observer

A scratching, spitting, and finally purring tour de force.

Will Self

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, The Times

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, Daily Telegraph

Engaging, amusing, perceptive and untimely, in the most admirable Nietzschean sense.

Mark Rowlands, New Statesman