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Loading... The "Simpsons" and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer (Popular Culture and…Series: Popular Culture and Philosophy (2)
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Oh don't be pretentious . . . it's fun! It's also all good. The ability to relate thought and thinking not only to the issues of today, but to the contemporary inculturated expressions of that thought is a necessary discipline if ideas are to be recognized and used well. This book undertakes that task well. Enjoy it - and admit it - you just wish you'd thought of it first! (  ) PastorBob | Nov 25, 2008 |  Interesting perspectives. (  ) skullstuffing | Sep 28, 2008 | I was a bit worried that reading this book would ruin the Simpsons for me but I'm happy to report that I still laugh out loud every time I watch it. The essays were all vastly different - for example some tended to explain characturistics of the Simpsons using different philosophers and some tended to try to explain certain philosophies using the Simpsons as examples. Some worked for me and some didn't. Some of the authors missed the point that the Simpsons is written to be funny - for example in "Thus Spake Bart" (a Neitzscean analysis of Barts characture) the author misses the irony in a dialog between Bart and Lisa and attributes Bart's response to the loss of his identity as a rebel (personally I think it's just a gag - just a we all sometimes say things that we don;t really mean for the sake of a cheap laugh. My favourite chapter was the one on semiotics towards the end which explained the difference between the written word (in which the signifier is inherantly abstracted from the signified) and media like photography or moving images in which the signifier seems (on the surface) to be inherant to what is being signified but (for example in advertising) the signifier is more than just a picture of an object, it is a production and the objects are made to look a certain way. I guess that's why visual media is so important to advertising and why western culture is increasingly visual. Intersting (very interesting) :-) (  ) neiljohnford | Feb 18, 2008 | Many a true word is spoken in jest. muir | Dec 7, 2007 | The Simpsons gets me suckered into buying another book exploring all the meaning and philosophy behind my favorite show. This is probably the best of these types of books. ( ) HvyMetalMG | Aug 22, 2007 |  no reviews | add a review
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The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Homer Simpson/archive1 |
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The book collects 18 essays into an unpretentious, tongue-in-cheek, and surprisingly intelligent look at philosophy through the lens of Matt Groening's vaunted animated series. The editors are quick to point out that they don't think The Simpsons "is the equivalent of history's best works of literature ... but it nevertheless is just deep enough, and certainly funny enough, to warrant serious attention." The writers of the book are mostly professional philosophers, and they are appropriately erudite. But what is truly astonishing, even for a confessed Simpsons addict, is their breadth of Simpsons knowledge, spanning all 12 seasons of the show's history. The Simpsons and Philosophy is obviously not intended to be a turning point in modern thought, but it is an excellent introduction to some core elements of philosophy. --Eric de Place
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:10 -0400)
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