The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to life
Life, he declared, is only worth living if you think about what you are doing. An unexamined existence is all right for cattle, but not for human beings.
Nigel Warburton • A Little History of Philosophy (Little Histories)
Today, there is perhaps no animal we are more unmoored from than ourselves. ‘The world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal,’ writes the natural philosopher Melanie Challenger in How to Be Animal (2021) . ‘ And the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn’t want to be an animal.’
Erica Berry • ‘Playing animal’ reflects back our yearnings and repulsions | Aeon Essays
“The distinction between man and animal runs right through the human species itself: only the best (aristoi), who constantly prove themselves to be the best, and who ‘prefer immortal fame to mortal things,’ are really human; the others, content with whatever pleasures nature will yield them, live and die like animals.”
Tom Butler Bowdon • 50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting Seeing - Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books (50 Classics)
word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans—i.e., “human relationality”—that undergirded meaning.