The word of dog What our canine companions can teach us about living a good life

Mark Rowlands

Book - 2025

"If you have spent any part of your life with a dog, you may have found certain questions popping, unbidden, into your mind: Is my dog living a fulfilled life? Is my dog a good dog? Does my dog love me? Addressing these questions compels you to confront not just your dog's life but yours as well--to think about what fulfillment, and meaning, in life really is. In The Word of Dog, philosopher Mark Rowlands explores these questions and suggests that in dogs we can see hints--faint, shrouded, but discernible--of what a better way of living might look like. Perhaps none of us can be happy in the way a dog can, but The Word of Dog shows us we could do a lot better than we're doing simply by listening to the unspoken wisdom our dog...s reveal to us every day of their happy, uncomplicated lives." --

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Subjects
Published
[New York, New York] : Liveright Publishing Corporation 2025.
Language
English
Main Author
Mark Rowlands (author)
Edition
First American edition
Item Description
"First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Granta Books as The Happiness of Dogs: Why the Unexamined Life Is Most Worth Living"--T.p. verso.
Includes index.
Physical Description
249 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781324095682
  • Shadow's rock
  • The unexamined life
  • Mirror, mirror
  • A gambler's freedom
  • Good dogs
  • A design for life
  • Just dogs with the yips
  • Sometimes toward Eden
  • Further reading.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

An inquiry into the moral and philosophical minds of our best friends. Does the dog have Buddha nature? So runs the Zen koan. Philosophy professor Rowlands takes a slightly different tack, wondering ofCanis lupus familiaris, "If a dog could write a book of philosophy, what would it look like?" It might argue that happiness is a warm bone, might assert that "I bark, therefore I am." By Rowlands' reckoning--and he's not afraid to stretch possibilities into propositions that at first glance might seem absurd--a dog runs free of invidious distinctions, living in a moral universe governed by love, and in all this comes Rowlands's kicker: "As a general rule, I think, dogs lead more meaningful lives than we do." To defend the thesis, Rowlands enlists much heavyweight help, although, given Jean-Paul Sartre's rather dour assessment of the human condition, one wonders if that's not stacking the deck. Life being tragic, Rowlands supplies a sadly tragic hero with a pet German shepherd that is "deeply paranoid" and "distinctly dangerous" and for that reason is not allowed entry into polite society: His Sisyphean task, as Rowlands notes, is to chase invasive iguanas into the canal that affords him safe room to roam. Is Shadow, the dog, happy? Is his life meaningful? Well, borrowing again from Sartre, Rowlands ponders what the situation might have been if Sisyphus, rolling that rock endlessly uphill, actually took pleasure in the task. Examined life, meaningful life, mirror neurons, and "the groundlessness of our existence and the anguished realization of our groundlessness": All come into play in his account. Although the book is rewarding in that it sparks a few synapses, before tackling this one, readers will benefit from learning a bit about modern philosophy to be able to decipher dense philosophical prose. Being a dog lover helps, too. Occasionally tangled, but with plenty of juicy existential problems to gnaw on. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.