“If Plato or Plotinus had lived with a dog—a dog that could talk Greek, that is—the History of Philosophy might have been even more interesting than it is. Luckily, David Bentley Hart had his dialogues with Roland, in the most lucid of English, and we are all the richer for them—just as we all share in his grief for the vanished canine philosopher. These dialogues are as rich, humane, funny, and stimulating as when we first met Roland in Moonlight.” —A.N. WILSON, author of Goethe: His Faustian Life and Prince Albert: The Man Who Saved the Monarchy
“There is a terrible philosophical timidity, typical of modernity, that refuses to accept that the mind and the cosmos are instinct with life from top to bottom, that our very ability to ask ourselves whether we are ‘really’ conscious and free is evidence that we are these things. No contemporary writer has done more to lay out the arguments against these life-denying reductionisms than David Bentley Hart. A similar timidity—a similar refusal to believe in any fact, however obvious, if it happens to be beautiful—may keep some readers from admitting to themselves that this book and its companion volume, Roland in Moonlight, are as good as they actually are: a spectacular recovery of the ancient art of the philosophical dialogue. Such readers only punish themselves. The Roland books are not only wonderfully enjoyable, and deeply poignant: they are major works by a major author, or, what is better, by a major canine intellectual and his human collaborator.” —PHILIP CHRISTMAN, author of How to be Normal and Why Christians Should Be Leftists
