Today is the two-year anniversary of the death of an animal companion who was very close to me. She was a cat, and her name was Sassy, but like many beloved animals she wound up with a whole bunch of other names instead. But this isn't really about that! What I wanted to talk about were some reflections from Seneca, the great Stoic philosopher, about grieving and memory and friendship.
And this may seem a little incongruous to some, the fact that I'm going to use a cat as a prime example here, because you might say, ah, you know, they're just dumb animals. They're not human beings. They're not persons. And that's certainly true that they're not rational agents in the same degree as we are, but I think you can say that there's a lot more going on, at least in some animal life, than many philosophers, particularly in the past, accounted for. So they're not rational in the same way that we are, but they certainly do have and act on and show emotions and they have desires and they engage us. And we can form bonds with at least certain animals.
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