Category: Animals
-
Are the Souls of Brutes Subsistent?
Aquinas says No but his argument is inconclusive. Substack latest. Reader Zacary writes, I am just a layman who likes studying Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy, and recently I haven’t been studying the issue of animals in the afterlife. I stumbled across your post from many, many years ago (all the way back in 2009!) that…
-
Pet Love as Idolatry?
Problems of attachment and grief. Substack latest.
-
Cat and Man
From the journal of a cat man. The cat is happy to reside within his limits: he does not aspire. He is incapable of hubris. There are no feline tragedies. A cat can be miserable, and so can a man, but only a man can be wretched. A man is an animal, but an abyss…
-
I Kill a Bug
And when I do, I apologize to him: "Sorry, man, nothing personal; but just one of my thoughts is worth more than your entire life." But if the insect is no distraction and can be easily dispatched to the outdoors, that is where he goes, or is sent. Sentience as such, no matter how low…
-
On the Suffering of Non-Human Animals
Animal life is “poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” But this gloomy Hobbesian description must be balanced by the recognition that a suffering animal is not a man suffering as an animal suffers. We must discipline our tendency to project and imagine. To imagine that a cat dying of cancer suffers as a man dying…