How to Research Like a Dog
Kafka’s New Science
A provocative book that proposes a new and surprising inspiration for philosophy today—the canine thinker from Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog.”
Written toward the end of Kafka’s life, “Investigations of a Dog” (Forschungen eines Hundes, 1922) is one of the lesser-known and most enigmatic works in the author’s oeuvre. Kafka’s tale of philosophical adventure is that of a lone, maladjusted dog who challenges the dogmatism of established science and pioneers an original research program in pursuit of the mysteries of his self and his world. In How to Research Like a Dog, Aaron Schuster uses the canine as a guide dog to rediscover Kafka’s fictional universe, while taking up the cause of this ingenious, possessed, melancholy, comical, and revolutionary thinker.
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