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Books : Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
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Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals by: John Gray List Price: £8.99 Vegetarian Books Price: £6.99 You Save: £2.00 (22%)Prices subject to change. |
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Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 128 EAN: 9781862075962 ISBN: 1862075964 Label: Granta Books Manufacturer: Granta Books Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 246 Publication Date: September 01, 2003 Publisher: Granta Books Studio: Granta Books Sales Rank: 6597 Related Items:
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Editorial Review: Amazon.co.uk Review: John Gray's Straw Dogs attempts to present a world view in which humans are not central and which argues against the humanist belief in progress. The heart of the book is summed up in the idea that modern humanists have still not come to terms with Darwin, still not come to terms with the idea that humans are like other animals. Christians and modern humanists in the Platonic-Cartesian tradition typically think of humans enjoying a special relationship to God, or a special status in nature in a way that other animals do not. Even the great debunkers--philosophers such as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Heidegger--end up making human beings the centre of things or the end point of some world-historical process. By contrast, in a Taoist, Shinto, Hindu or animist culture Darwin's discovery would have been easily accommodated since these faiths see humans and other animals as kin. In short, for Gray, humanism is nothing more than "a secular religion thrown together from decaying scraps of Christian myth". Gray champions James Lovelock's view of the Earth as a self-regulating system whose behaviour resembles, in some ways, that of an organism. The Gaia hypothesis is the backdrop to Gray's apparently relentless pessimism about the fate of humankind. What it teaches us is that this self-regulating system has no need of humanity, does not exist for the sake of humanity, and will regulate itself in ignorance of humanity's fate. Straw Dogs can be usefully compared with Mary Midgely's excellent Science and Poetry since both take off from the view of man as animal while sharing similar views about the cultural role of philosophy. Both encourage us to overcome the Platonic-Cartesian-Kantian philosophical tradition while stressing the importance of Gaia in emphasising our essential continuity with the physical and natural world. For Gray, humans "think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals". Straw Dogs could have been made to stretch for 500 large pages. Instead you get 200 small pages of gold; simple, concise, riveting.--Larry Brown Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
 Rating:  - OverratedThis polemic is an attack on humanism. Is it just another deluded philosophy? Nothing more than the various religions it tries so hard to differentiate itself from? If you are going to constructively criticise something, you need to be sure you understand what it is you are criticising. Does Gray? Most religions use scripture as some sort of starting point to define their belief system. Christianity has the Bible, Islam the Koran, Hindu has - amongst others - the Upanishads. Each religion then tries to interpret their respective scripture. They may disagree on the details but the basis of the belief system is defined. Humanism, has no scripture. So is it just a subjective philosophy? The closest we have to an objective ... Read More: Rating:  - Straw dogs is very much a straw manThe reason I stopped reading this execrable book after sixty pages is not because I thought it was wholly wrong - indeed I agreed with much of what gray said. The reason why the book was totally facile was because Gray never backs up his assertions by evidence or even argument; it's just a collection of his opinions. Such assertions carry zero weight, and so this is basically an exercise in narcissism... besides which it's supposedly 'revolutionanry' disbelief in progress has actually been the status quo during the last century, from the existentialists and nihilists down to the postmodernists. Furthermore, the book fails to distinguish between counting humans as 'other than' animal and in the notion of progress, which is ... Read More: Rating:  - Hard to dismiss on many levels....John Gray makes - in my opinion - a convincing argument for accepting the improbablity which most of us face: that of ever knowing the "truth". You can bet your life (I don't exaggerate) that the likes of Dawkins et al are way off the mark in their assumed position of authority when it comes to third person verification of the fundamental properties of reality. Equally, philosophy is limited (though it's far more self-conscious of the fact!) in its ability to make any assertion "absolute". Religion/Theology is likewise destined to suffer the fate bestowed upon it by history - namely that of being utterly subjective in its origins. So, barring a personal revelation of Eckhartian proportions (which is hard to imagine even with unflinching ... Read More: Rating:  - Very important bookThis book is brilliant. His all too true for comfort veiws put humans in their place and his analysis of the world is excellent. Of course it has flaws and errors and i'm not saying he's completely right, but he still gives an incredibly accurate depiction and is a highly important book. Even if just to see another side of the argument you should read it. It will certainly change your mind about something if not everything. Read this book!!! Rating: - Straw dogs or straw men?So much of this book consists of plainly falsifiable bald assertions that I find it staggering that the famous names writing the crits have been prepared to put their names to it, let alone gush over it in the way they have. It's frustrating, because a lot of the substance of what he says, in the sense that the orthodoxy he attacks is actually incoherent, is valuable, if not exactly new; unfortunately, he obscures it with bad argumentation and structure. Gray states, for example, that we can have no coherent, consistent 'self' because all we are (in consciousness) is a disjointed group of memories, with nothing tying them together except the illusion of continuation, to which we are genetically pre-disposed. Fine, it's a theory, and not ... Read More: |
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