The Happiness of Dogs

1. Shadow's Rock

• Dogs as happy Sisyphus

2. The Unexamined Life

• Reflection occurs when your mental acts turn back ether on you or on some part or facet of you, a part or facet that you recognize as yours, whether this is mental or physical.
• Shame is only possible for a creature capable of reflection. Shame is shame in the eyes of a nominal other - whether that other is someone else, or you, or some non-existent alternative.
• The humble sea squirt eats its own brain.
• A brain, fundamentally, is a biological strategy, and any strategy stands or falls on the relative weight of its costs and benefits. Sometimes, the costs of brains can outweigh their benefits.
• With the development of literacy our outstanding natural memory started to wither.
• Existential phenomenology - Its goal is to understand the fundamental structures of consciousness by virtue of which a conscious creature exists in the specific way it does.
• Reflection is consciousness turning back on itself and thus turning away from the world, turning inwards rather than outwards. Reflection pulls us out of the world and into ourselves.
• Our lives are eerie in the sense that we have no real home. Because of reflection, we are unhomed creatures: never quite a home in the world, never quite comfortable in our skins any more.
• The highest expressions of human creativity are flow experiences where the reflective sense of self is at its most attenuated.
• Sports take us back to a time before the Fall, when we were creatures untainted by reflection. When we play, and all is going right, and we flow from one movement into the next, never thinking about ourselves and what we are doing, because we know thinking would be flow's death, that is when we are most like our dogs.
• Reflection is a wound that cannot be healed. It neatly severs us in two, and has left us uneasy, troubled creatures.

3. Mirror, Mirror

• A creature capable of pre-reflection is necessarily aware of itself, but pre-reflectively rather than reflectively. Any animal - human, canine, or otherwise - that is conscious of the world at all will be pre-reflectively aware of itself too.
• Seeing is a predictive process (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, through to modern neuroscience) and there is a kind of implicit, tacit awareness of self that is built into the process of seeing).
• Awareness of one's body and awareness of one's mind are two very different abilities. There is nothing in mirror self-recognition that demonstrates an ability to engage in the second - meta-cognitive - form of reflection.
• You first learn to understand what it is for someone else to think something, or to want something, and then you learn to apply the concepts of thinking and wanting to yourself.
• Split in two, we can never again be whole - single, undivided, of one heart and one mind. Thus we live and at the same time we watch ourselves doing this. We can never be fully immersed in our lives; never be quite fully committed to what we think and do.
• Our commitment is always conditional. It is what we might call troubled commitment. For we are troubled creatures.
• A dog's mind is serene: unruffled, untroubled, an early-morning sea on a summer's day. But the minds of creatures of reflection are choppy and never calm.
• It is no coincidence that ancient philosophy from Socrates on and modern philosophy from Descartes are obsessed with radical, methodological doubt. Doubt runs deep in us.

4. A Gambler's Freedom

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5. Good Dogs

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6. A Design for Life

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7. Just Dogs with the Yips

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8. Sometimes Toward Eden

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