Cats and the Meaning of Life

Feline Philosophy

'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 ... a wonderful mixture of flippancy and profundity, astringency and tenderness, wit and lament' Jane O'Grady, Daily Telegraph 
 
'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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

John Gray's most recent book is the highly praised Seven Types of Atheism; his other books include Straw Dogs, Black Mass, The Soul of the Marionette and The Silence of Animals. He has kept feline companions for over thirty years.

'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.

Seven Types of Atheism

SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
WINNER OF THE CATHOLIC HERALD BOOK AWARD FOR RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 
 
A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019 
 
'Wonderful ... one of the few books that I started to reread a couple of minutes after I'd finished it.' - Melvyn Bragg 
 
A meditation on the importance of atheism in the modern world - and its inadequacies and contradictions - by one of Britain's leading philosophers 
 
'When you explore older atheisms, you will find some of your firmest convictions - secular or religious - are highly questionable. If this prospect disturbs you, what you are looking for may be freedom from thought.' 
 
For a generation now, public debate has been corroded by a narrow derision of religion in the name of an often very vaguely understood 'science'. John Gray's stimulating and extremely enjoyable new book describes the rich, complex world of the atheist tradition, a tradition which he sees as in many ways as rich as that of religion itself, as well as being deeply intertwined with what is so often crudely viewed as its 'opposite'. 
 
The result is a book that sheds an extraordinary and varied light on what it is to be human and on the thinkers who have, at different times and places, battled to understand this issue.

A highly readable, fascinating book that jerks the debate on religion versus atheism right out of its crusted rut into the light of serious intellectual scrutiny

Wonderful ... the range, thoughtfulness and trenchant sense of Gray's sweep across the centuries of thought is wholly exhilarating ... one of the few books that I started to reread a couple of minutes after I'd finished it.

John Gray's major books include Straw Dogs, Black Mass and The Silence of Animals. A second edition of his essays, Gray's Anatomy, was published in 2016. He now principally writes for the New Statesman.

'When you explore older atheisms, you will find some of your firmest convictions - secular or religious - are highly questionable. If this prospect disturbs you, what you are looking for may be freedom from thought.' 
 
For a generation now, public debate has been corroded by a shrill, narrow derision of religion in the name of an often very vaguely understood 'science'. John Gray's stimulating and extremely enjoyable new book describes the rich, complex world of the atheist tradition, a tradition which he sees as in many ways as rich as that of religion itself, as well as being deeply intertwined with what is so often crudely viewed as its 'opposite'. 
 
The result is a book that sheds an extraordinary and varied light on what it is to be human and on the thinkers who have, at different times and places, battled to understand this issue.

Selected Writings

Gray's Anatomy

'The most prescient of British public intellectuals' Pankaj Mishra, Financial Times 
 
Updated with a new foreword and two new chapters of John Gray's writing. 
 
Why is progress a pernicious myth? Why do beliefs that humanity can be improved end in farce or horror? Is atheism a hangover from Christian faith? John Gray, one of the most iconoclastic thinkers of our time, smashes through civilization's long cherished beliefs, overturning our view of the world and our place in it.

Gray's dissection of modern delusion, cant and wishful thinking is to be welcomed in this moment of convulsion ...  This is a book to learn from and argue with

A thoroughly enjoyable book ...  These essays cover a remarkable range of topics, from Isaiah Berlin to Damien Hirst, from torture to environmentalism. But their unifying theme is that our naïve belief in the idea of progress has turned modern life into a constant round of shadow-boxing

A visionary ... one of the most reliably provocative and heterodox voices in British intellectual life today

Gray has consistently anticipated the shape of things to come . . . he teaches us that true humanism is to be found in uncertainty and doubt

Invigorating...elegant, witty, incisive... Gray's assault on Enlightenment ideas of progress is timelier than ever

John Gray is most recently the acclaimed author of Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions, Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. He is Emeritus Professor of European Thought at the University of London.

'The most prescient of British public intellectuals' Pankaj Mishra, Financial Times 
 
This edition is updated with a new foreword and two new chapters of John Gray's writing. 
 
Why is progress a pernicious myth? Why do beliefs that humanity can be improved end in farce or horror? Is atheism a hangover from Christian faith? John Gray, one of the most iconoclastic thinkers of our time, smashes through civilization's long cherished beliefs, overturning our view of the world and our place in it.

A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom

The Soul of the Marionette

TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2016 
 
'Gray must be one of the best read of contemporary philosophers, trawling insouciantly through high-, middle- and low-brow literature with the sharp-eyed eclecticism of a magpie of genius' John Banville, Guardian 
 
'Like Isaiah Berlin with a thing for sci-fi' Tibor Fischer, Spectator 
 
Everyone thinks they want to be free - or do they? John Gray's thought-stirring new book on freedom draws together insights from Gnosticism, science fiction, ancient sacrifice and the occult to show that freedom is an illusion and that, like fairground puppets, humans dream of escaping the burden of choice altogether.

A generous and energising tumble of ideas...he is inventive and penetrating

Like Isaiah Berlin with a thing for sci-fi

We might believe that we are on a voyage towards a future of perfect freedom, but Gray is here to tell us that we are really only going round in circles, repeating ancient heresies, and retelling old myths in modern cant

Gray must be one of the best read of contemporary philosophers, trawling insouciantly through high-, middle- and low-brow literature with the sharp-eyed eclecticism of a magpie of genius

A brain-twisting meditation on freedom...a brief, elliptical inquiry designed to raise more questions than anyone could answer

John Gray is the author of a number of highly regarded and controversial books, including False Dawn, Straw Dogs and, most recently, The Silence of Animals. He has taught at Oxford, Harvard, Yale and the LSE. John Banville described The Silence of Animals as 'a marvellous statement of what it is to be both an animal and a human in the strange, terrifying and exquisite world in which we straw dogs find ourselves'.

In The Soul of the Marionette, John Gray draws together the religious, philosophic and fantastical traditions that question the very idea of human freedom. We flatter ourselves about the nature of free will and yet the most enormous forces - biological, physical, metaphysical - constrain our every action. Many writers and intellectuals have always understood this, but instead of embracing our condition we battle against it, with everyone from world conquerors to modern scientists dreaming of a 'human dominion' almost comically at odds with our true state. 
 
This is a stimulating and enraging meditation on everything from cybernetics to the fairground marionettes of the title.

On Progress and Other Modern Myths

The Silence of Animals

The powerful, beautiful and chilling sequel to the bestselling Straw Dogs 
 
'By nature volatile and discordant, the human animal looks to silence for relief from being itself while other creatures enjoy silence as their birthright' 
 
Why do humans seek meaning to life? How do our imaginations leap into worlds so far beyond our actual reality? In this chilling and beautiful sequel to Straw Dogs, John Gray explores how we decorate our existence with countless fictions, twisting and turning to avoid acknowledging that we too are animals. Drawing on an extraordinary array of writers who are mesmerized by extremity, from Ballard to Conrad, Gray makes us re-imagine our place in the world.

The Silence of Animals is a new kind of book from Gray, a sort of poetic reverie on the human state, on the state, that is, of the human animal ... He blends lyricism with wisdom, humour with admonition, nay-saying with affirmation, making in the process a marvellous statement of what it is to be both an animal and a human in the strange, terrifying and exquisite world into which we straw dogs find ourselves thrown

Interesting, original and memorable ... The Silence of Animals is a beautifully written book, the product of a strongly questioning mind. It is effectively an anthology with detailed commentary, setting out one rich and suggestive episode after another

A secular prophet, sensationally truth-telling, clear-sighted and unperturbed by the illusions under which the rest of us labour ... what's more unexpected is how beautifully the unbearable quality of that desperation is evoked

He takes down utopians of various stripes and then starts wiggling the dentist's drill in the liberal molar ... In Gray's book, it's humanity that is the problem: we need to get over ourselves

For all its dark thrills, Gray's aria of negativity is intended to prepare the reader for a revelation. "Nothingness," he writes, "may be our most precious possession"

John Gray has been Professor of Politics at Oxford University, Visiting Professor at Harvard and Yale and Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. He now writes full time. His books include False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals and The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death. His selected writings, Gray's Anatomy, was published in 2009.

The Strange Quest to Cheat Death

The Immortalization Commission

John Gray's The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death raises vital questions about the 'truths' science can offer, the technology we are still exploiting for immortality - and exactly what it means to be human. 
 
 At the heart of all human experience lies our obsession with death. For many years, we turned to religion for our answers, but at the turn of the twentieth centuries ideas from evolution and politics seemed to suggest that our lives - and afterlives - were in our own hands. 
 
 These ideas would have both trivial and terrible effects, from the nightmares of H. G. Wells's science fiction and the wild, sweeping craze of séances to the murder of millions in the Stalinist terror. 
 
 'Our sharpest critic of utopian fantasies skewers the crazed but enduring dream of cheating age, time and death' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Boyd Tonkin, Independent 
 
 'Elegant ... He is on to something important regarding the delusion that science consists of indefinite progress' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Sunday Telegraph 
 
 'One of the most important and insightful polemicists currently writing in English... humanism's most vocal critic' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Financial Times 
 
 'Gray is an engaging writer, an entertaining historian and a controversialist whose opinions can never be taken for granted' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;New Statesman 
 
 John Gray has been Professor of Politics at Oxford University, Visiting Professor at Harvard and Yale and Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. His books include False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia and Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. His selected writings, Gray's Anatomy, was published in 2009.

The most prescient of British public intellectuals

Gray has consistently anticipated the shape of things to come ... he teaches us that true humanism is to be found in uncertainty and doubt

The closest thing we have to a window-smashing French intellectual

Gray is a philosophical maverick, a pricker of bubbles, a deflater of balloons, a true iconoclast for whom our chief competing accounts of existence - the religious and the humanist - are both fatally flawed

A romp of a read ... John Gray is a connoisseur of human idiocy

Our sharpest critic of utopian fantasies skewers the crazed but enduring dream of cheating age, time and death

John Gray, the counter-prophet who scorns all claims that humans can transcend the human condition ... You don't have to agree with Gray to enjoy the fireworks

Elegant ... He is on to something important regarding the delusion that science consists of indefinite progress

Gray is an engaging writer, an entertaining historian and a controversialist whose opinions can never be taken for granted

John Gray is most recently the acclaimed author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions and False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. Having been Professor of Politics at Oxford, Visiting Professor at Harvard and Yale and Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, he now writes full time. His books and articles have been translated into over thirty languages. His selected writings, Gray's Anatomy, were published by Penguin in 2009.

SUNDAY TIMES, NEW STATESMAN and TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR 
 
At the heart of all human experience lies our obsession with death. For many years we turned to religion for answers, but with the twentieth century came ideas from evolution and politics to suggest that our lives - and afterlives - were in our own hands. Such ideas went on to have both trivial and terrible effects: from a sweeping craze of séances to the mass-murders of the Stalinist terror. 
 
Gray raises vital questions about the 'truths' science can offer, the technology we are still exploiting for immortality - and exactly what it means to be human.

Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

Black Mass

Will there ever be an end to global conflict?

A prophetic warning against the foolishness of crusades, John Gray's Black Mass challenges our belief in human progress. 
 
 Our conventional view of history is wrong. It is founded on a pernicious myth of an achievable utopia that in the last century alone caused the murder of tens of millions. 
 
 In Black Mass John Gray tears down the religious, political and secular beliefs that we insist are fundamental to the human project, examines the interaction of terrorism, declining world resources, environmental change, human myths of redemption and a flawed belief in Western democracy, and shows us how a misplaced faith in our ability to improve the world has actually made it far worse. 
 
 'Brilliant, frightening, devastating' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;John Banville, Guardian 
 
 'A brilliant polemic ... Gray's most powerful argument yet' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;J.G. Ballard, Guardian, Books of the Year 
 
 'Causes vertigo when it does not cause outrage' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Sunday Times 
 
 'Exhilarating, invigorating' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Literary Review 
 
 'Savage. Gray raises profound and valid doubts about the conventional "plot" of modern history' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Financial Times 
 
 'A load of bollocks ... could hardly be more bonkers if it was crawling with lizards' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Sunday Telegraph 
 
 John Gray has been Professor of Politics at Oxford University, Visiting Professor at Harvard and Yale and Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. His books include False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals and The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death. His selected writings, Gray's Anatomy, was published in 2009.

John Gray&rsquo;s most recent books are Straw Dogs (&lsquo;That rarest of things, a contemporary work of philosophy, wholly accessible and profoundly relevant to the rapidly evolving world&rsquo; - Will Self), Al-Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern (&lsquo;The most arresting account I have read of our current crisis&rsquo;, Ian McEwan) and Heresies.

Our conventional view of history and human progress is wrong. It is founded on a pernicious myth of an acheivable utopia that in the last century alone caused the murder of tens of millions. In Black Mass John Gray tears down the religious, political and secular beliefs that we insist are fundamental to the human project and shows us how a misplaced faith in our ability to improve the world has actually made it far worse.

John Gray

A timely meditation on the passing of the liberal age, and on the life and afterlives of its grandfather, Thomas Hobbes. Composed with Gray’s characteristic erudition and taste for the ironies of intellectual history, The New Leviathans is a provocative delight, even as the author’s premonitions about the world to come are thoroughly discomfiting.

Post-Scruton, John Gray is Britain’s best philosopher – and he knocks it out of the park with a book that details the unravelling of the Western order.

Gray is conscientiously illusionless, scrupulously refusing to believe in any of the ideals and comforting dreams that humans use to protect themselves against reality. This, perhaps, explains his popularity with my own much-disillusioned generation ... Gray’s philosophy is the thread that joins my friends of disparate political inclinations.

An elegy for western liberalism ... a bracing thinker.

Gray is a voracious, indeed an omnivorous, reader and a vivid writer, the essays are individually enjoyable and interesting ... crisp, critical analysis.

It confronts the truth that no politician dares utter: that things are very bad with a world in which, in Gray’s words, either market forces are directed by the state or the state has been captured by corporate power.

Author J. G. Ballard claimed that Straw Dogs challenges assumptions and exposes delusions. With his latest book, Gray continues to do both these things.

Thoughts After Liberalism

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?

John Gray

Praise for The New Leviathans

A timely meditation on the passing of the liberal age, and on the life and afterlives of its grandfather, Thomas Hobbes. Composed with Gray’s characteristic erudition and taste for the ironies of intellectual his ...

Post-Scruton, John Gray is Britain’s best philosopher – and he knocks it out of the park with a book that details the unravelling of the Western order.

Gray is conscientiously illusionless, scrupulously refusing to believe in any of the ideals and comforting dreams that humans use to protect themselves against reality. This, perhaps, explains his popularity with my ...

A timely meditation on the passing of the liberal age, and on the life and afterlives of its grandfather, Thomas Hobbes. Composed with Gray’s characteristic erudition and taste for the ironies of intellectual his ...

Post-Scruton, John Gray is Britain’s best philosopher – and he knocks it out of the park with a book that details the unravelling of the Western order.

Gray is conscientiously illusionless, scrupulously refusing to believe in any of the ideals and comforting dreams that humans use to protect themselves against reality. This, perhaps, explains his popularity with my ...

A timely meditation on the passing of the liberal age, and on the life and afterlives of its grandfather, Thomas Hobbes. Composed with Gray’s characteristic erudition and taste for the ironies of intellectual his ...

Post-Scruton, John Gray is Britain’s best philosopher – and he knocks it out of the park with a book that details the unravelling of the Western order.

Gray is conscientiously illusionless, scrupulously refusing to believe in any of the ideals and comforting dreams that humans use to protect themselves against reality. This, perhaps, explains his popularity with my ...

Books by John Gray

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