“Stories to Meditate On”: Animals in Gaita’s Narrative Philosophy

Abstract

Narrative philosophy is the Australian philosopher Raimond Gaita’s answer to the question of how to philosophize in a manner that directly informs efforts to answer the classic philosophical question of ‘how best to live’. Gaita claims, provocatively, that getting the world in view in a manner relevant to arriving at an answer involves challenges that, far from being merely theoretical, are such that we can only meet them by working on ourselves or, alternately, by reshaping our sense of what matters. A productive philosophical intervention would thus need to be in the business of directing our attitudes and would have to have the hallmark of literary discourse or “narrative.” This chapter lays out Gaita’s case for thinking that we need narrative philosophy, and it discusses some of Gaita’s efforts to present us with such a philosophy, specifically in relation to ethical thought about human-animal relations. An important virtue of Gaita’s approach is that it equips us to overcome the philosophically influential, but morally questionable, idea of tension between the moral standing of animals and the moral standing of severely cognitively disabled human beings.

This chapter is the text of a lecture delivered at a public symposium in honor of Raimond Gaita, in Adelaide, Australia, in July of 2015.