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