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Loading... The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death, and Happiness (edition 2009)by Mark Rowlands
Work InformationThe Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death, and Happiness by Mark Rowlands
![]() None No current Talk conversations about this book. ![]() ![]() A clear mind and an inspiring life. I'm glad there are people (and wolves) out there like that and I wish he had been one of my philosophy tutors..... even while I wonder if I would have been happy to be one of his neighbours while my kids were small. Thanks for sharing - life and philosophy - and for writing so well. The best thing about this book had nothing to do with the author's contribution. I was visiting with a friend's family in Ireland and her stepdad was nice enough to let me borrow his copy. I could see all the red scribbles, circles, underlines, and notations he made throughout the book as I read. It can be fun to follow the leave-behinds of a previous reader. He clearly enjoyed the book more than I did. It wasn't a bad book per se...I just found it really difficult to relate to the author. To sum up the book: People bad. Wolves great. It was the first time I read a philosophy book. I must say I enjoyed it very much. It’s well written, it made me think about a lot of things, and I agree with the author on most of them. I like the way the author explains his thinkings through the wolf’s behaviour. His relationship with his wolf has been very important to him, and I can understand why, I love animals. This is also a book for animals lovers and for all the people who wants to read something different from novels and thrillers (at least that’s what I usually read!). I think it would be a good present for a reader-friend, and I’ll read more from this writer.
The writing from time to time hits an enjoyable kind of stride, but it is always hobbled by what it is – a lame ventriloquist act full of false wisdom and faked naturalism. We have a terrible habit of trying to make animals what we want them to be, which always seems to be something in relation to us, rather than something in and of themselves. And so the story of the wolf continues, and remains little more than a story about man, and how he envies the strength and silence of the inscrutable hunter. Philosopher Mark Rowlands is not what one would classically think of as a great writer, in that his prose is not supernally poetic like Loren Eiseley’s, he does not use easily understood but well-targeted metaphors like Stephen Jay Gould, nor does he have the raw power that Friedrich Nietszche did. But he manages to convey highly nuanced and deep concepts in remarkably simple sentences and constructs as he grounds each seemingly pedestrian sentence with its neighbor in ways that crescendo. It's an unusual little book: not quite an autobiography (a lot of the time its subject cedes the limelight to his four-legged companion), nor straightforwardly a work of philosophy (as Rowlands acknowledges, it smells a bit too much of real life to pass muster with his professional colleagues). It is perhaps best described as the autobiography of an idea, or rather a set of related ideas, about the relationship between human and non-human animals. The Philosopher and the Wolf is a powerfully subversive critique of the unexamined assumptions that shape the way most philosophers - along with most people - think about animals and themselves
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![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)128Philosophy and Psychology Philosophy Of Humanity The Human ConditionLC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
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