Plato and Platypus Walk Into a Bar Review

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Is This Some Kind Of Joke?

Tim Madigan laughs at platypi.

[A review of Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar… Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein; and Sci-Phi: Philosophy from Socrates to Schwarzenegger and Everything I Know I Learned from TV: Philosophy for the Unrepentant Burrow Potato, both by Mark Rowlands.]

Kant's Joke. Kant wanted to testify in a fashion that would dumbfound the mutual homo that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote confronting the scholars in favor of the popular prejudice, but for scholars and non popularly.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 193 (Walter Kaufmann translation).

I don't know if Kant would accept appreciated Nietzsche'south witty remark, but I must admit information technology fabricated me express joy when I first read it. Yet I suspect information technology's not the sort of joke (or meta-joke) that would amuse anyone who was not steeped in the weird world of High german Idealism. The virtue of the three books being reviewed here is that none of them presume whatever groundwork knowledge in philosophy – they seek to enlighten through amusement by relying on jokes and examples that just nearly anyone could understand. Consider the post-obit old chestnut that Cathcart and Klein chronicle:

Secretarial assistant: Doctor, there's an invisible homo in the waiting room.
Doctor: Tell him I can't see him.

Drumroll, please! Somehow Cathcart and Klein use this to illustrate Kant'due south discussion of the ding an sich and his paradigm shift in epistemology. Through retelling other classics Henny Youngman himself might accept blushed at using, they shamelessly illustrate many of the master points of philosophy. Here'southward another example, in a give-and-take on 'state of affairs ethics':

Armed robbers burst into a bank, line upwards customers and staff against the wall and begin to take their wallets, watches, and jewelry. Two of the banking concern'south accountants are among those waiting to exist robbed. The first accountant suddenly thrusts something in the hand of the other. The 2d auditor whispers, "What is this?" The kickoff accountant whispers back, "It'south the l bucks I owe yous."

Cathcart and Klein both majored in philosophy at Harvard, but wisely chose to pursue careers in social work and comedy writing. They know their stuff, and article of clothing their learnedness lightly, and Plato and a Platypus is a pleasure to read. The championship, by the style, is a joke set-up, and they are offering a prize for whoever can come up with the best ending for it (see their website world wide web.platoandaplatypus.com for details).

Equally a lifelong addict of old jokes I can't assist but beloved this book, and I have been quoting liberally from it in my classes. Here's some other favorite of mine, which they utilise in their chapter on the Philosophy of Religion to discuss the possibility of knowing the futurity:

"My granddaddy knew the exact time of the verbal mean solar day of the exact year that he would die."

"Wow, what an evolved soul! How did information technology come up to him?"

"The guess told him."

That's fatalism with a smile.

Marker Rowlands, Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire, takes a slightly more conventional approach in his two books, at least in the sense that he gives more thorough analyses of philosophical concepts than is institute in Cathcart and Klein. In the Sci-Phi book he utilizes such pop science fiction films as The Matrix, Full Think, Star Wars and Blade Runner to illustrate such topics as Cartesian skepticism, personal identity, skillful versus evil, and decease and the meaning of life; while in the Idiot box volume he mines such popular television receiver shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and Seinfeld to unearth what they have to say on such topics every bit ethical obligations, the connexion between moral goodness and psychological health, the nature of happiness and individualism and selfishness. In this regard he is emulating the arroyo taken past the myriad other 'Philosophy and Popular Culture' books that take flooded the marketplace. The difference, though, is in Rowlands' tone. He is, to put it bluntly, a smartass. He writes in the vernacular, drops in wisecracks on every folio, and can't resist a snide annotate whenever the occasion arises. For instance, in Sci-Phi, when discussing the idea that philosophy is a form of therapy, he attributes the idea rightly to Ludwig Wittgenstein; just then Rowlands adds that Wittgenstein was "a human every bit in need of therapy every bit any philosopher who ever lived." Well-nigh bookish philosophers would recoil in horror from such an ad hominem remark; but somewhere in his eternal recurrence Friedrich Nietzsche is smiling. And later on all it was Wittgenstein who once remarked to his friend Norman Malcolm that a serious work in philosophy could consist entirely of jokes. Only while the 3 works in question don't consist entirely of jokes, their intent is certainly serious – to make off-puttingly abstruse concepts accessible through sense of humor.

Every bit with almost other 'Philosophy and Popular Culture' works, I'chiliad not so sure these books alone are sufficiently explanatory. For novices interested in learning more about the topics addressed it would be best to supplement their reading with every bit well-written merely less joke-laden books such as Virtually Philosophy by Robert Paul Wolff (whom Cathcart and Klein credit equally existence a mentor, kind of). Yet, I highly recommend all three: they are proficient opening portals into the mysteries of philosophy for beginners, and pleasing reminders for those of us already ascending the dank, mossy walls of Plato'south Cave to not take ourselves too seriously. As that jester Friedrich Nietzsche asked in Thus Spake Zarathustra, "Who amidst you tin can express mirth and exist elevated at the aforementioned time?" Or, every bit Mark Rowlands puts it, in Everything I Know I Learned from Tv, "Philosophy hasn't died in our modern cultureless culture; it has simply relocated." Similarly, old jokes never die, they just become recycled – equally in the following from Cathcart and Klein's discussion of Ideal Virtue:

At a meeting of the higher kinesthesia an angel of a sudden appears and tells the head of the philosophy department, "I will grant you whichever of three blessings you lot choose: Wisdom, Dazzler â€" or ten meg dollars."

Immediately, the professor chooses Wisdom.

There is a wink of lightning, and the professor appears transformed, but he just sits there, staring downwardly at the tabular array. One of his colleagues whispers, "Say something."

The professor says, "I should take taken the money."

© Tim Madigan 2007

Tim Madigan claims to accept originated the following joke, which never fails to elicit a 'spittake' when related at American Philosophical Association gatherings: "What'southward a logician'due south favorite pornographic novel? Venus Infers."

Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar… by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, Abrams Image, 2007, ISBN: 978-0-8109-1493-3; 200 pps, $eighteen.95 Sci-Phi by Mark Rowlands, Thomas Dunne Books, 2003, ISBN0-312-32236-iv, 276 pps, $14.95. Everything I Know I Learned from TV by Marking Rowlands, Ebury Press, 2005, ISBN 0-09189- 835-i, 282 pps, $12.89.

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Source: https://philosophynow.org/issues/64/Is_This_Some_Kind_Of_Joke

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