Graybeard

When his religious upbringing was no longer tenable, J.D. Steens turned to philosophy to find a worldview that would work for him. The problem he ran into was that, while philosophy seemed divorced from science, science would have nothing to do with philosophy. In this book, J.D. Steens tries to tie these two approaches together by formulating a philosophical worldview that is based on science, or at least not inconsistent with it.

The voice for this perspective comes through Graybeard, a chimpanzee, whose namesake was David Graybeard, one of Jane Goodall's first chimpanzee subjects. Upon their invitation, Graybeard shares his own ideas with Plato, Schopenhauer, Lao Tzu, Darwin, the Buddha, Einstein, and others, in a parallel universe setting.

In this book, Graybeard links the world of science (biology) and philosophy, in one fundamental way: Though an animal, he and humans (and all of life) are motivated by the same forces - the need to survive and the fear of not surviving. From this perspective, fundamental philosophical themes can be deduced.

This is the third book of Steens' philosophical trilogy. The first was Philosophical Travels with Carl: Freedom in the Oregon Outback, and the second was Babu: A Philosophical Quest. Both are published on Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.