For many years Swedish archeologists have stumbled upon domestic cat remains in the Viking age graves. Most of the graves in this paper come from southern Sweden and Mälaren Valley where many finds have been studied. The questions are how much of the cats is left in the grave material, what kind of grave goods were deposited with the dead, if cats are usually buried either with men or women and what the combinations of all the different animal species that cats were buried with can tell us. The theory in this work is concerning human - animal relations between the vikings and their cats with the weight on antropocentrism. The point of the mentioned theory in this paper is to provide answers to what cats could mean in the viking burial ritual context. 17 grave fields have been analysed for this work with the biggest part of them located in the Mälaren Valley regions (14 grave fields), and 3 in southern Sweden. The result of this study implies that cats in the analysed Mälaren Valley and southern Sweden graves were buried with wealthy people like aristocrats and merchants. They were also seen as exotic pets during their lifetime. The cats were usually buried with other animals like dogs, horses and chickens which all propably had a status of sacral animals during viking age. Cats' remains condition is also brought up as the felines were found either as partial or full/ almost complete skelettons. Analysis results also imply that cats were buried as often with men as with women and there are also rare cases of child burials with these animals.

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In this paper, I attempt to understand how Merleau-Ponty views the relation between nature and reflection, as well as the meaning behind the terms “human” and “animal” and the relations between them. I approach this by outlining the transition from Merleau-Ponty’s early philosophy (SB, PP) to his late philosophy (N, VI). Roughly understood as the shift from inquiries into the nature of experience to inquiries into the experience of nature. I show that this shift or turn can be understood in terms of a reconsideration of the nature of experience, which opens toward non-human animal reflection; to the simultaneous kinship and estrangement in animal interspecificity. The paper is divided into three parts: In the first part, oriented around Phenomenology of Perception, I outline the grounding of reflection in the co-natural corporeity of perception. In the second part, I present the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s turn to nature through his reading of Schelling. What becomes visible here is his reversal of method following his turn to nature. Essentially, this reversal of method tempts a reconsideration of reflection: reflection is no longer separated from nature, but a fold within nature itself; a dehiscence of the flesh opening a “mirroring reflexive” within nature itself as nature’s self-reflection, exemplified through the sensing-sensible human body. In the third part, the same reversal of method is considered in relation to animality. I contrast Merleau-Ponty’s account of life and animality in his second course on nature against his views in The Structure of Behavior. Consequently, his account of the grounding of reflection in the corporeity of perception is deepened and his ontology of sensing-sensible is further clarified. In the last sections of the third part, I discuss Merleau-Ponty’s account of the human-animal relation, I then briefly discuss his account of painting as a privileged form of ontological expression, and I finally speculate openly about the alterity of other animals and the possibility of animal philosophies.