Raimond Gaita: The Philosopher's Dog

By TIM DARE*

Raimond Gaita is an academic philosopher, but this is not a typical academic philosopher's book. It is accessible, though not easy.

It begins with an account of Gaita's relationships with family pets; a cockatoo named Jack, the eponymous philosopher's dogs Orloff and Gypsy, and a cat called Tosca. These narratives lead to issues ranging from animal consciousness to sex and fatherhood.

Along the way, Gaita draws on diverse literary and philosophical sources from Coetzee to Wittgenstein.

Gaita's central idea is that traditional philosophy, with its emphasis on reason and argument, cannot address adequately questions about the meaning of life and relationships.

Facts and logic do not govern the realm of meaning. For instance, if we ask if someone knows what it means to be poor, we are not asking them to consider the facts, but to feel the right way about those facts.

Indeed, Gaita argues that the idea that we proceed deductively from evidence to conclusions about whether there are, for instance, other minds, is conceptually mistaken.

Our dealings with others generate not beliefs, assumptions or conjectures about other minds, but the very concepts of person, thought, feeling, and so on. We could not put the questions, employing the language and concepts they require without accepting there are other minds and that some of them are non-human.

Gaita's personal narratives are not simply a catchy gimmick. Narrative is not limited to logic and argument but gives ways of seeing and understanding characteristic of the realm of meaning.

A person trying to make me appreciate the meaning of something might tell me a story, read me a poem or show me a passage from Coetzee.

How convinced one is may depend on how far one shares Gaita's view of the meaning of our concepts.

For instance, according to Gaita, an inconsolable tension between aloneness and community lies at the heart of our concept of mortality.

This understanding cannot be achieved by anyone afraid of his emotions, nor by someone whose life has not been touched by sorrow deeply felt and acknowledged.

If you don't understand mortality as Gaita does, it seems that is because you are afraid of your emotions or have not been touched by sorrow. So there, that's settled.

Gaita's book is engaging and challenging. When there is reasonable disagreement on the meaning of concepts, however, reason and argument may be a better bet than conceptual stipulation.

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* Tim Dare is a lecturer in the University of Auckland philosophy Department.