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
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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