The writing from time to time hits an enjoyable kind of stride, but it is always hobbled by what it is – a lame ventriloquist act full of false wisdom and faked naturalism.

We have a terrible habit of trying to make animals what we want them to be, which always seems to be something in relation to us, rather than something in and of themselves. And so the story of the wolf continues, and remains little more than a story about man, and how he envies the strength and silence of the inscrutable hunter.

Philosopher Mark Rowlands is not what one would classically think of as a great writer, in that his prose is not supernally poetic like Loren Eiseley’s, he does not use easily understood but well-targeted metaphors like Stephen Jay Gould, nor does he have the raw power that Friedrich Nietszche did. But he manages to convey highly nuanced and deep concepts in remarkably simple sentences and constructs as he grounds each seemingly pedestrian sentence with its neighbor in ways that crescendo.

It's an unusual little book: not quite an autobiography (a lot of the time its subject cedes the limelight to his four-legged companion), nor straightforwardly a work of philosophy (as Rowlands acknowledges, it smells a bit too much of real life to pass muster with his professional colleagues). It is perhaps best described as the autobiography of an idea, or rather a set of related ideas, about the relationship between human and non-human animals.

The Philosopher and the Wolf is a powerfully subversive critique of the unexamined assumptions that shape the way most philosophers - along with most people - think about animals and themselves