What I most value about Temple Grandin is that she asks very basic questions, ones that perhaps should be obvious, but which almost nobody else is willing to ask, at least without immediately dismissing the matter with some vague unsupported generalization. These are questions that are often broadly speaking "philosophical," but which seem a little too plain and direct for most academic philosophers. How, for example, do cows or dogs see the world? What is important to them? What makes their lives worth living? Or not worth living? For that matter, what makes our lives worth living? And is it the same thing?

 

 

And she goes further still. Since she works in slaughter houses, she asks, what is death?...