Entertaining and slyly illuminating.
From Zeno to Nietzsche, a lighthearted, illustrated romp through philosophical thought.
Cathcart (The Trolley Problem, or Would You Throw the Fat Guy Off the Bridge?: A Philosophical Conundrum, 2013, etc.) and Klein (Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It: Wisdom of the Great Philosophers on How to Live, 2015, etc.) once studied philosophy together at Harvard and later teamed up to riff on the subject in Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates (2009). Their latest collaboration takes a cheerful, irreverent look at perennial philosophical questions—e.g., the meaning of life, morality and ethics, theories of knowledge, determinism and free will—as expressed by cartoons. Cartoonists, they agree, “are keen observers of the state of our society, its quirks and ironies,” including metaphysical conundrums. In 18 chapters, each headed by a cartoon from the likes of Leo Cullum, Bradford Veley, Aaron Bacall, and George Booth, the authors touch on the ideas of more than 70 philosophers and theorists, including Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl, Maimonides, Karl Marx, and René Descartes, “the first modern epistemologist,” who asserted that every perception of the world could be doubted except his certainty of himself as thinker. His famous proclamation “I think, therefore I am” informs the book’s title. Besides the philosophers, the authors quote frequently from Woody Allen, another deep thinker, who rings in on the philosophy of time (“Time is God’s way of keeping everything from happening at once”) and the problem of identity (“My one regret in life is that I am not someone else”). An appendix of terse “biosketches” are heavier on anecdote and quirky detail than philosophical explication. Kant, for example, “found social relationships sorely lacking,” and Heidegger’s “obscurity leaves plenty of room for improvisation in bull sessions.” Although Cathcart and Klein admit that they “stretch a connection here and there” between some cartoons and philosophical issues, they do succeed in making philosophy accessible and fun.
Entertaining and slyly illuminating.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-14-313302-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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