Of Pigs and the Proper: Philosophy and the Other in Plutarch’s Gryllus

Plutarch’s Gryllus stages a dialogue between Odysseus and one of his men who was turned into a pig by Circe about whether animals are more virtuous than humans. This playful treatise raises serious questions about the place of the other in philosophy: must philosophy exclude the other in order to constitute the proper domain of reason (logos) or does it require the other for its practice of intellectual inquiry through dialogue (dialogos)? Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, this paper examines how Plutarch’s treatise thinks through these questions in relation to the animal other. Putting a philosophy of the proper into the mouth of a pig, Plutarch’s Gryllus leaves us to wonder what is proper to philosophy itself—a properly philosophical question.