![]() Still, some of them, like the one above, could help readers get their minds around philosophical concepts like empiricism. I’ll admit I chuckled at a couple of them, but they weren’t knee-slappers, nor were many of them new. All the jokes are pretty corny-the kinds of jokes you’d expect some old guy to tell at a Catskills resort. Just as Morty is about to open his mouth, Lou jumps out of bed and says, “Before you say anything, old pal, what are you going to believe, me or your eyes?”Ĭlearly, Lou is not an empiricist. ![]() Morty comes home to find his wife and his best fried, Lou, naked together in bed. Here, for example, is a joke about empiricism (the belief that we gain knowledge through sensory data): As you might expect from the title, the book is written in a light style and is peppered with jokes that are meant to illuminate the concepts discussed. I picked up this little book by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein in hopes that it could be a useful, and fun, refresher.Ĭathcart and Klein cover such basic philosophical concepts as logic, ethics, relativity, existentialism, and yes, epistemology. So I ended up finding philosophy interesting, but it isn’t always easy for me to keep all the terms straight or to wrap my mind around all the concepts explored in philosophy. And the study of how we know what we know can be quite fascinating. Epistemology may be a long, fancy word, but it’s not nearly the mouthful that “the study of how we know what we know” would be. But much to my surprise, I actually enjoyed philosophy and realized that those fancy terms could be a useful shorthand. In fact, I had a sneaking suspicion that all these fancy words were just ways to dress up a lot of ideas that either amounted to nothing more than common sense or that weren’t worth thinking about. It just seemed like so much gobbledygook to me-epistemology, ontology, noumenology, blahblahdelogy. Sequels Ī successor, Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington, was published on January 1, 2008, and uses the same structure and theme of the first book to explore a variety of logical fallacies, using statements from prominent American political figures as examples.When I started working on my master’s in theology, the class I dreaded more than any other was philosophy. In a review for Philosophy Now, Tim Madigan noted that the book was "a pleasure to read", saying that its jokes "shamelessly illustrate many of the main points of philosophy" and while questioning if it and similar books alone would be "sufficiently explanatory", still recommended it. The question is about the existential circumstances in the here-and-now, but the answer is from a grand, universal vantage point, what the latter-day Hegelian Bette Midler called “seeing the world from a distance." In this gag, Lenny is giving a Hegelian answer to an existential question. Lenny shrugs and says, "Everybody's got to be someplace." Stunned, he says, "Lenny, what are you doing here?" He opens the closet to hang up his coat, and finds his best friend standing there, naked. "A guy comes home from a business trip and finds his wife in bed, a nervous look on her face. At the beginning and end of each chapter, a gag between two characters named Dimitri and Tasso is also featured. Each chapter is structured through exploring a series of concepts related to the branch of philosophy, usually beginning with a description of the concept, a joke, and an explanation of the joke. The book is split up into several chapters, each covering a different branch of philosophy, such as metaphysics or epistemology. ![]() He hoped readers of the book would come away "with a good general background" of the subject, stating "it's kind of Philosophy 101". In an interview with NPR host Liane Hansen, Klein stated that when he and Cathcart were studying philosophy at university, they noticed many similarities to the structure of jokes, which lead to the idea for the book. What the philosopher calls an insight, the gagster calls a zinger. They tease the mind in the same ways…philosophy and jokes proceed from the same impulse: to confound our sense of the way things are, to flip our worlds upside down, and to ferret out hidden, often uncomfortable, truths about life. ![]() The concept behind the book in the Introduction: “The construction and payoff of jokes and the construction and payoff of philosophical concepts are made out of the same stuff. Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar – Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes is a 2007 book by Thomas Wilson Cathcart and Daniel Martin Klein that explains several philosophical concepts with the help of jokes that serve to illustrate the points in the book.
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