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Animals

Plato is my dog, yo!: Dogs, Love and Truth

Jeremy Barris enlists the help of Plato, Ortega and pragmatist philosophy to argue that love at its deepest is our connection with ultimate truth, and that this connection is found in our love for our dogs.

If dogs are not our best friends, they are among them. We love them, they love us, and these are very meaningful feelings for us. I want to explore how these deep, largely wordless (or at least not very wordy) bonds are the same as the deepest dimension of any love bonds we have. They are certainly a lot more limited in scope than our love bonds with humans, but I think these limitations only affect the upper, shallower areas of what love consists in and offers. In fact, just because our love for our dogs is missing most of the higher levels, it takes in the deeper dimensions of love more purely than our love for humans does.

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