“For the most part, the novelist’s invitation to see is so much more compelling than the philosopher’s invitation to think,” writes Mark Rowlands in his strange hybrid of a book. That would certainly explain why there are many more bestselling novels than philosophical treatises. But if like Rowlands you are a philosopher, that poses a problem: how can you make philosophy grab readers and drag them along your often tortuous and sometimes torturous avenues of argument?
“Perhaps philosophy only becomes truly persuasive when it most closely approximates literature,” suggests Rowlands, who has already successfully taken his own advice. The Philosopher and the Wolf centred on his relationship with his canine companion, Brenin, and was an original and deeply involving combination of memoir and philosophical investigation. If his follow-up, Running With the Pack, did not reach the same heights, that says more about the excellence of its predecessor than its own deficiencies.
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