Hugely enjoyable, and one of my favourite books of the year.Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein wrote the bestselling Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, which will be translated into more than a dozen languages. I would also say it would be exceedingly difficult to keep a straight face throughout. I would estimate that it would be almost impossible for you to read it and not learn something. Mind you, I’ve heard of a tv show featuring Aristotle, Bentham and Spinoza entitled The Only Way is Ethics.
Unless you think Immanuel Kant is a contestant on American Idol, that is. The only criticism I might have about it is that it does demonstrate a bit of an American bias at times, so every now and then, you might just be jolted into thinking, “what the heck? That doesn’t belong there” against some throwaway comment or a reference to a celebrity you’ve never heard of. I wanted to keep going.Įven the setup included a Socratic dialogue that runs through the length of the book, with one character trying to demonstrate to another what philosophy is all about. I admit I made fairly short work of it, as it was just too interesting to read a few pages at a time. If you want an introduction to philosophical ideas, I suppose you could get Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, which, though I’m sure it’s very good, wouldn’t quite have the same verve about it that this work has.
The explanatory elements are always done in a tongue-in-cheek way, yet this isn’t done at the expense of their pedagogical element. We take in a broad scope of metaphysics, philosophy of religion, feminism and philosophy of language, amongst others. What we have then is a whistle-stop tour of the history of modern western philosophy. Many of the jokes are those you will have heard before and though this is not an analysis of humour, it does help understand the absurdities that create the humour – or rather, it helps to understand why the absurdities are absurdities. The general structure is that the authors give a short précis about a topic in philosophy before demonstrating it in use in a joke. From the start, I found it to be a delight. The subtitle of the book gives the concept: explaining philosophy through jokes. One day, I was exploring around the philosophy section of the Waterstones flagship store in Piccadilly I spotted it out of the corner of my eye.
It’s a book that I had been after for some years, but could never find it for a reasonable price. This was my “coffee table” book that I dipped into every now and then, after finishing Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities.
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