Justin Smith piques my interest in philosophy which, to be honest, has never really gotten much past boozy renderings of “The Philosopher’s Song.”

…
It would be vastly too ambitious to attempt to argue here that the entire history of philosophy might be understood as a series of attempts on the part of humans to either distance themselves from the dogs, or to recognize their community with them. This is a project for another time. What I would like to do now is simply to give a sense of the enduring importance of dogs for philosophy, by sketching out the various ways in which they make themselves known in the period of philosophy I know best: the one that extends roughly from Rorarius’s bold treatise That Brute Animals Make Better Use of Reason than Humans (originally composed around 1539 but only published in 1647), to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s 1706 report to the French Academy of Sciences on, of all things, ‘A Dog that Speaks’. As Dennis Des Chene has noted, in this period “[t]he concept animal is charged not only with designating a class of creatures, real and imagined, but also with supplying a contrast to the human” (216). Yet different animals contrast in different ways: the ape tells us certain things about ourselves (I’ve dwelt on apes at length elsewhere), the ox other things, and the insect still others.

…

Now which good philosopher wants a biscuit?