John Gray

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 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.

 

Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the World. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, Hobbes' cold political vision continues to see through any number of political and ethical vanities. In his wonderfully stimulating book The New Leviathans, John Gray allows us to understand the World of the 2020s with all its contradictions, moral horrors and disappointments through a new reading of Hobbes' classic work. The collapse of the USSR ushered in an era of near apoplectic triumphalism in the West: a genuine belief that a rational, liberal, well-managed future now awaited humankind and that tyranny, nationalism and unreason lay in the past.

Since then, so many terrible events have occurred and so many poisonous ideas flourished, and yet still our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations which will somehow dissolve away. Hobbes would not be so confident. Filled with fascinating and challenging perceptions, The New Leviathans is a powerful meditation on historical and current folly. As a species we always seem to be struggling to face the reality of base and delusive human instincts. Might a more self-aware, realistic and disabused ethics help us all?