Sign Up for Session Three of The Peak Notions Book Club!
This one's for animal lovers, humanists and misanthropes (also people who like funny cat videos on the internet)
“We humans have a pronounced facility for passing over the aspects of ourselves we find distasteful. And this extends to the stories we tell to explain ourselves to ourselves.”
Mark Rowlands, The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness
The Peak Notions Book Club has been on hiatus while I emigrated to Australia and got settled in, but now it’s back!
For session three, we’ll be going in a different direction and reading philosopher Mark Rowlands’ The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness. I read this book several years ago and found myself gripped by it for a number of reasons. It situates philosophy in the everyday, where it’s generally most meaningful. For that reason I categorise The Philosopher and the Wolf as a philosophy book despite its engaging warmth and accessibility (much as I love philosophy, a lot of it makes for cracker-dry reading). If you’re well versed in philosophy, you’ll find the influence of people like Nietzsche, Heidegger and Camus throughout this book which is purportedly about one philosophy professor’s relationship with his pet wolf, but you don’t need to know anything about those philosophers to find value in Rowlands’ accessible, thought-provoking and evocative writing.
Philosophers have a tendency to affect a sort of curated inscrutability, especially on the page. It’s the kind of demeanour which suggests they operate primarily on a cognitive, logical plain and would never been seen eating Rice Crispies or laughing aloud while watching silly cat videos on the bus (like this one):
Rowlands wields his philosophical training and rigour against himself rather than taking shelter behind it. This is unusual, not least because it explores the value in self-reflection and the capacity to generate vast questions through the mundane human experiences which accumulate into a life. The result is ostensibly a book about Rowlands’ relationship with his wolf, Brenin, and their travels around the world together as Rowlands isolated himself from other people and moved between jobs. Really though, it’s a book about philosophy — how Brenin ultimately influenced Rowlands’ work, outlook, and perception of what is it to be a human animal. It’s also a book about outsider status, love, death and happiness, what we owe to and can learn from the non-human creatures who share our lives and homes, and the uniqueness and limitations of human beings.
How The Peak Notions Book Club Works
The Book Club is a monthly meeting (with a new sign-up sheet and book each time, so you can dip in and out depending on your interest) where we discuss works of non-fiction and fiction from a philosophical perspective. You don’t have to know anything at all about philosophy to come along but it should still be interesting for you if you do — the aim is to have an enjoyable conversation together, read more and encounter great writing as we go, all while honing our critical thinking skills. I’ll guide the discussion and keep things running but this isn’t a lecture or tutorial — it’s a dynamic conversation that we’ll create together.
The book club is my way of thanking the paid subscribers (welcome if you’re new!) who keep Peak Notions afloat, and of building community here. It takes research, work, and admin (which is so utterly not my forte!) so for that reason it is open to paid subscribers only. There are 15 spots available for the third Peak Notions Book Club session, which takes place via Zoom at 8:30pm GMT on Thursday November 2nd. The Book Club is a perk for the paid subscribers who keep Peak Notions going and fund the work that I do. You can get all the details and put your name on the list via the sign-up sheet below:
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