The jokes are quite good - but the philosophy is mostly highly superficial ( )

I picked up Plato and a Platypus... on a whim, an impulse buy as I was heading out of a Barnes & Noble one day. I think the orange cover caught my eye, and then a quick scan of the subject matter piqued my curiosity. Jokes? I like jokes. Philosophy? I don't know much about it, but it always seemed like something I *should* know more about, something I would like to know more about. So I brought it home and started flipping through it.

I'm amazed at how much enjoyment I got out of it. First of all, a couple of the jokes I had to bring around to the wife and tell her. A couple of gems in there. (Mostly not, but that wasn't the point of the book. Besides, pick up any book of jokes - and I've picked up my share - and you'll know that it's mostly a collection of banality surrounding a couple of great knee-slappers.)

But mostly I enjoyed how the humor taught me a little about each different school of philosophy discussed. I can't say I'm walking away an expert in any of them, but I'm certainly a little more enlightened now. ( )

If you’ve never studied philosophy, you may have an image of its practitioners as pipe smoking men in tweed jackets with elbow patches. Or perhaps you picture a dotty professor wandering the campus muttering incoherently. Be prepared to shed those stereotypes after reading these two irreverent excursions into the philosopher’s realm.

Though Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein both majored in philosophy at Harvard their credentials to write Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar aren’t exclusively academic. Cathcart worked with Chicago street gangs amidst several stints in divinity school, while Klein wrote for standup comics and designed stunts for Candid Camera. But those diverse experiences gave them the ideal grounding to produce a breezy survey of the history of philosophy filtered through the prism of humor.

Cathcart and Klein’s thesis is that the “construction and payoff” of both jokes and philosophical concepts are “made out of the same stuff.” Philosophy and jokes “proceed from the same impulse,” they assert, “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. What the philosopher calls an insight, the gagster calls a zinger.”

In just shy of two hundred pages, they support that thesis with a grab bag of jokes, as they race along on a whirlwind tour of the world of philosophy, from metaphysics, to logic, to the philosophy of religion. No matter your sense of humor, it’s likely you’ll find stories and quips that will make you howl, chuckle, and occasionally groan, but all in the service of illuminating some often abstruse philosophical concept. Space permits me to cite only two brief examples: To illustrate the concept of divine law, they tell of Moses descending from Mt. Sinai, tablets in hand. “I’ve got good news and bad news,” he proclaims. “The good news is I got Him down to ten. The bad news is adultery is still in.” Or this one, to bring into focus the notion of existential anxiety: To the restaurant customer who asks the cook, “How do you prepare your chickens?” the cook replies, “Oh, nothing special, really. We just tell them they’re going to die.”

To help readers keep it all in context, there’s even a highly idiosyncratic chronology of “Great Moments in the History of Philosophy” that manages to mention Plato, Kierkegaard and the Marx Brothers in the same timeline and an only slightly more serious glossary for the compulsive sorts desiring extra credit.

Given the success of Plato it’s understandable that Cathcart and Klein would want to extend their franchise. Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington is a stinging attack on the almost infinite species of doublespeak that infect modern politics. The authors couldn’t be any more blunt when they observe that they’re “perplexed and intrigued by subtler stuff: words that have been cunningly fashioned to sound like they mean something --- something important and compelling --- but that on careful inspection can revealed to be bulls**t.”

And there’s no shortage of examples here of the worst offenses in the world of public discourse, summed up in the pithy observation that, “It is often said that all of life is high school --- over and over again. But we beg to differ, at least when it comes to political rhetoric, where a good part of life is grade school.” If you’ve been following the health care debate with any degree of attention you’ve heard a good number --- “contextomy” (taking your opponent’s words out of context), the slippery slope argument and weasel words, to cite but a few of the most egregious. In fact, it might not be a bad idea to keep Aristotle next to your TV remote when you settle in to watch the next political debate.

Even if you don't share their taste in humor it's fair to say that Cathcart and Klein have made a determined, if decidedly unconventional, attempt to liberate philosophy from the musty halls of academe. Perhaps that won’t inspire you to blow the dust off a volume of Kant or Nietzsche, but don’t be surprised if you’re tempted to ask yourself whether philosophy might just have some relevance for you after all.

Copyright 2009 Harrisburg Magazine ( )

Very entertaining book on CD - we listened to this while driving down to the coast for Thanksgiving. I ended up buying tthe book on CD for my dad because he was a Philosophy major and doesn't have the attention span for reading much anymore. The jokes are funny and do a great job of demonstrating the principles. ( )

This book succeeds in making philosophy interesting. It takes the basic categories of philosophy—existence, knowledge, government, ethics, etc.—and illuminates them by telling jokes.

I bought this book as a light read during summer holidays and loved it. It made me laugh out loud, and added a few jokes to my arsenal. It had an other interesting side-effect, though: its broad overview of philosophy helped to clarify the major schools of thought in my mind. The glossary contributed significantly to this. It was written in such a witty manner that it compels you to read it. (I can't ever remember reading a glossary before!)

Buy it for the knowledge or the humour—you will not be disappointed. ( )