  In this contribution we report about Feynman's approach to gravitation,
starting from the records of his interventions at the Chapel Hill Conference of
1957. As well known, Feynman was concerned about the relation of gravitation
with the rest of physics. Probably for this reason, he promoted an unusual,
field theoretical approach to general relativity, in which, after the
recognition that the interaction must be mediated by the quanta of a massless
spin-$2$ field, Einstein's field equations should follow from the general
properties of Lorentz-invariant quantum field theory, plus self-consistency
requirements. Quantum corrections would then be included by considering loop
diagrams. These ideas were further developed by Feynman in his famous lectures
on gravitation, delivered at Caltech in 1962-63, and in a handful of published
papers, where he also introduced some field theoretical tools which were soon
recognized to be of general interest, such as ghosts and the tree theorem. Some
original pieces of Feynman's work on gravity are also present in a set of
unpublished lectures delivered at Hughes Aircraft Company in 1966-67 and
devoted primarily to astrophysics and cosmology. Some comments on the relation
between Feynman's approach to gravity and his ideas on the quantum foundations
of the fundamental interactions are included.
