Catherine Osborne, Dumb Beasts and Dead Philosophers: Humanity and the Humane in Ancient Philosophy and Literature (Book Review‪)‬

Catherine Osborne, Dumb Beasts and Dead Philosophers: Humanity and the Humane in Ancient Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), xi + 262 pp. In this intriguing, quirky, and frustrating study Catherine Osborne adopts a kind of idealist, quasi-Platonist perspective from which to examine and extol the humane outlook she finds in selected authors from Pythagoras to William Blake. The thesis that drives her inquiry is that we can learn moral truths better from listening to poetry and stories than from "arid argument" (viii) and "rational debate" (5).