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Jacob Held has written extensively on philosophy and popular culture, having edited Dr. Seuss and Philosophy and Roald Dahl and Philosophy, coedited James Bond and Philosophy, and contributed to volumes on the Beatles, South Park, and Watchmen, to name a few. He teaches philosophy at the University näytä lisää of Central Arkansas and lives in Conway, Arkansas. näytä vähemmän

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Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach Test (2009) — Avustaja — 225 kappaletta
Star Trek and Philosophy: The Wrath of Kant (2008) — Avustaja — 172 kappaletta
Porn: How to Think with Kink (2010) — Avustaja — 31 kappaletta

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Philosophy & Terry Pratchett is a collection of essays that connect Terry Pratchett’s Discworld with common Philosophical Quandaries and how Pratchett goes and views the solutions. Drawing from a wide range of Pratchett’s material along with a wide swath of regular philosophical works makes this book really fun to read.

There are thirteen essays in all, focusing on different aspects of Philosophy as it is demonstrated in Pratchett’s novels. Each essay focuses on a different character or set of characters and how they show this or that quality. Basic questions that are answered are quandaries such as Gender Roles and what determines it in society, how to know what is good for you, what makes us human, and so on. Along the way, we meet famous philosophers like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beauvoir, Wittgenstein, and so on.

So for example, there is a character that appears in Equal Rites named Eskarina Smith. On the Discworld, there is a tradition of the eighth son of an eighth son becoming a powerful wizard. However, Pratchett turns this on its head since Eskarina is female. Wizards aren’t female, there aren’t women wizards. Women become witches, not wizards. This is a view held by both sides, Granny Weatherwax attempts to teach magic to Eskarina using the ways of the witch, but is unsuccessful. Eskarina becomes accepted by the end of the novel though, and eventually becomes relatively puissant.

Usually, in Pratchett’s works, there is a character that is living about their lives, and something changes in how they do things. Take the instance of Cheery Littlebottom, another case in the Gender Issues department. Cheery is a Dwarf. Now the thing you have to take from this is that Cheery is both female and a dwarf, which is something that is frowned upon by the other dwarves. It makes them uncomfortable to be confronted with this idea. It isn’t that female dwarves are nonexistent, it is just that they don’t have a word to go along with it. It puts things into a fascinating perspective.

Along the way, we meet our favorite Anthropomorphic Personification, Death, and his battles with the Auditors, the Night Watch and how they deal with duty, the best way to disguise yourself when you are already in a costume and so on. This mostly applies to the Wizards, but it does apply to the Night Watch as well. Like if the Wizards want to disguise themselves they have to pretend to be wearing a false beard, which leads to a large amount of humor on my end.

If you are a fan of Discworld or Terry Pratchett’s works, this is a great book. If you also happen to be a fan of Philosophy, this is a great book squared. Thus I would heartily recommend it to either or both.
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Floyd3345 | 1 muu arvostelu | Jun 15, 2019 |
Stephen King and Philosophy, edited by Jacob M Held, is a collection of essays focusing on philosophical readings of many of King's works. While this is somewhat academic in style the essays are accessible and concepts, as used by the writers, are explained adequately.

Like any book about an author's work, there are so-called spoilers. If you haven't read the works under discussion then the essays can only be read passively since one doesn't have a frame of reference to decide if the argument, to them, is valid. So this isn't really for people who haven't read some or most of King's work. I only bring this up because I saw someone who counted that as a negative when no book with which I am familiar that seriously tackles an author's work does so without substantiating their points with the author's text. I was surprised at the "criticism" of this work on that basis.

I did not find every argument equally convincing but that is to be expected. That said, I did not feel any essay went too far afield in their commentary, my differences tended to be one of degree. King's appeal has long been the human element, more precisely the element of human flaws, and how that can lead to catastrophe or at least extreme negative consequences. It is in the matching of this dynamic, flaws leading to consequences, to philosophical ideas where this book excels.

For those without a philosophy background, I think the essays present the philosophy parts of their assessments in fairly plain language, so don't be too concerned about that. It might require some pauses to make sure you are following the writer but you will be able to get through it. For those with a philosophy background, as you well know, there is always more left unsaid about a given philosopher's thought than is said, so try not to overly nitpick because a writer didn't use what you would have used given the same assignment. Unless you feel what was said was either wrong or misused it is nothing more than a different approach.

I would certainly recommend this to any Stephen King fan who likes to ponder a work after reading it. Educators will find this useful for both teaching King in the future and for ways to approach other authors through a philosophical lens.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
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pomo58 | 1 muu arvostelu | Nov 21, 2016 |
There are thirteen essays by different authors in this collection. One or two of them focus, at least in part, on the philosophical ideas contained or implied in the pages of Sir Terry's novels. The rest tend to use cherry-picked excerpts from the novels to expound on the philosophical positions of lesser thinkers, such as Hegel, Aristotle, Augustine, and Kant. (That's kind of a joke, but only kind of.)

There are some simple mistakes (like the essay that says that Tomjon was a blood relative of King Verence I. He wasn't, although he was the queen's son (wink wink). Neither the king nor Tomjon knew this). There is the essay that uses Death's well known conversation with Susan near the end of Hogfather to support Existentialism. (I think the author really missed the point about humans occupying the place 'where the falling angel meets the rising ape' on this). The worst offender, however, is the fifth essay, which is largely about economics. It views the unregulated commercial policies of Ankh Morpork as support for libertarianism, a lack of concern for the poor, and the acceptance of pollution as a trivial consequence of free enterprise. Does the author not understand what satire is or that Discworld is fantasy? Showing a polluted river and smog, beggars making the most out of living under a bridge, or a poor little match girl dying in the snow (Hogfather), does not imply that these things are just fine. The reader is already supposed to understand that such things are not desirable and therefor question if the policies that bring them about are sound. Discworld isn't a philosophical or economic treatise, and it's not dark fiction. It doesn't dwell on misery. Discworld is humorous fantasy with a fair amount of satire. The characters soldier on because that's what people do, but this doesn't imply that everything about their fictional world is acceptable.

I shelled out $25 for this because it seemed right up my alley. (I have a degree in philosophy and I'm a Pratchett fan.) The book is especially disappointing because it could have been so much better. It also would have been a good idea for the editors to run the final draft past the great man himself.
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DLMorrese | 1 muu arvostelu | Oct 14, 2016 |
Stephen King and Philosophy, ed. Jacob Held: Free review copy. I particularly enjoyed the opening essay by Held and C. Taylor Sutton on the problem of evil: how could God be both omnipotent and beneficient, when there is so much suffering in the world? (If a fawn dies slowly in a forest fire with no one to see, for example, that suffering can’t educate or otherwise improve anyone else.) The author runs through a number of philosophical treatments of the issue, including the lesson of Job, and King after him: suffering just is, and if it is consistent with an all-powerful and all-good God, humans can’t comprehend why. “If we claim that we see no reason for evil, is that a claim about God or about us? Is our lack of imagination proof against God?” I particularly liked the discussion of theodicy, and the argument that free will is a good that accounts for human evil: “If I build some kind of autonomous cleaning robot, few would say that I could improve it by giving it the capability to murder, even if it is not programmed to use that capability.” [But cf. Tony Stark.] Ultimately, however, he argues that a finite, embodied existence must have suffering; a world without evil would lack the differentiation and finiteness that are conditions of specifically human consciousness. Then the argument turns Bayseian: The existence of suffering doesn’t argue for or against the existence of God because we have no idea about what the prior probabilities involved are. Instead of the problem of evil, he argues, we need a strategy to cope with suffering, because suffering isn’t an argument, “but a condition to be tolerated, and perhaps redeemed.” And that returns us to King, whose works are generally about that issue, and whose recommended strategy is to care, to struggle, even if there is no ultimate answer.

Another chapter, by Kellye Byal, covers female subjectivity in Carrie—one bad mother encourages Carrie to harm herself, while another motherly figure tries to get her to fit in, but that’s not a solution either. Another, by Katherine Allen, discusses Pet Sematary and The Tommyknockers as “bioconservative fables,” cautionary tales about trying to exceed human boundaries. “When knocking down a wall, one should first check that it is not load bearing; our limitations may frustrate us, may often cause us great suffering, but they are also central to our identity.” Another, by Greg Littman, covers The Dark Tower and the idea that Roland’s flaw is his vision of his life as a linear quest rather than a circle; if it is a circle, then the only way for him to find meaning in it is to make it meaningful. Like Sisyphus, the author suggests, one must imagine Roland happy. Another chapter, by Michael Potter and Cam Cobb, covers Apt Pupil, the need for propaganda in successful teaching, and the way that power is fluid.

Elizabeth Hornbeck treats the Overlook Hotel as a Foucauldian heterotopia—a place that challenges ordinary social arrangements and brings together elements that aren’t supposed to exist together; the hotel is particularly suited to this function because a “home” isn’t supposed to be heterotopic, but is rather one of the normative social spaces against which heterotopias are defined. Heterotopias both protect “normal” spaces from transgressive activity and provide a space for those activities to take place: it is vital that they are both isolated and penetrable by those with the right permissions, as hotels are.

Joseph Foy & Timothy Dale examine Richard Bachman’s works in which humans—particularly humans mediated by a reality-TV culture—are the real monsters, and bread and circuses pacify the masses. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, the authors suggest that repressive cultures such as those in the Bachman books use violence to break down connections between people that might otherwise lead to political change. Yet the more violence is required, the more people question or distrust or resist the power of the state. The Bachman books are not hopeful, in that they end with individual rebellion rather than a joining together. (I didn’t realize that King allowed Rage to go out of print because he didn’t want to inspire school shootings; I think it’s probably too late.)

Greg Littman addresses the ethical/artistic role of horror, comparing the attitudes of Aristotle and Plato towards fiction. “Sadism toward imaginary people hurts nobody in itself, so need not be a wicked pleasure, but if it conveys any moral lessons at all, they aren’t good ones.” Yet horror fiction can be a useful way of thinking through, for example, what we’re justified in doing in order to survive. Horror can’t just be a way of purging negative emotions, because those of us who like it don’t feel like we’ve purged ourselves; we feel that it’s affirmatively pleasurable to read, and not really because of the author’s literary skill. “[T]he more we are sucked into the story like a child down a sewer, the less literary evaluation is likely to enter our head,” and horror connoisseurs “can get a taste for really shitty art.” Instead, the author proposes, the pleasure of horror is the pleasure of exercising our imaginations—and that’s why even bad horror can be so much fun; the work supplies a basic structure and our imaginations do the rest.

Charles Bane deals with the vagaries of intertextuality, and how King now says that the film version of The Shining was bad—because it was so “cold,” with Jack being crazy from the beginning, and the book was “hot,” with Jack trying and failing to be good. But, as the author points out, King actually uses a lot of other authors’ works, in quotations (especially song lyrics). The beginning epigrams set the novel’s tone even though King didn’t write them; this same intertextuality means that Jack seems disturbed from the outset in the movie because Jack Nicholson’s presence inherently evokes One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. King added a scene in the TV adaptation of The Shining in which Jack’s ghost visits Danny and they share an intimate moment, “reminding viewers that Jack wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Why this change? Perhaps King simply wanted to revise Kubrick’s reading, or perhaps he had begun to suspect, like Kubrick, that maybe Jack wasn’t such a good guy.” Ultimately, King doesn’t have interpretive authority over The Shining, any more than anyone else does.

Paul Daniels deals with time travel and the question of linear time in The Langoliers: is time like space, in that every moment in it exists now but we’re not there, or is there something special about the present? The eternalist says “it’d be a mistake to conclude that Pluto doesn’t exist merely because it’s not here, and likewise it’d be a mistake to conclude that Julius Caesar doesn’t exist merely because 49 BCE isn’t now.” The promise that there will be only one future, only one outcome, is the way that we hold ourselves together psychologically as we move through time, and King’s implicit argument in his books that deal with time are that ordinary people can hold up against the assault of many possibilities, even horrible ones, quite well.

Randall Auxier discusses time in the Dark Tower series and other books, including UR (which was released twice, once as a Kindle Single and once in edited form as part of a collection, removing references to JFK as well as to Gore’s loss in 2000).

Finally, Held returns to the problem of evil, this time invoking Schopenhauer. As he points out, King’s characters always face a choice: run (or drink), or fight against evil. There’s no ultimate victory, and no God-given goal. King’s children in particular suffer intensely, and often without hope of rescue, which is King’s view of our shared condition. But if suffering is inevitable, then Schopenhauer says that the best life is a heroic life, “struggling against overwhelming odds in some way and some affair that will benefit the whole of mankind,” even if they don’t reach their reward. And this struggle can be extending compassion to just one person who needs it. As King writes, “One kid doesn’t matter—not in the face of this… It was logical, but it was croupier’s logic. Ultimately, killer logic … The kid matters or nothing matters.”
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rivkat | 1 muu arvostelu | Jun 7, 2016 |

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