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Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes
By Thomas Cathcart, Daniel Klein
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Customer Reviews

Funny and well-written!
I absolutely loved this book! It is well-written, and has short-sequenced blurbs about such ideas as Zeno’s Paradox (logic), Applied Ethics, and Existentialism, in addition to others. I almost fell onto the floor with one particular illustration of two ducks standing on the porch in front of a gentleman’s door asking him, “Have you ever thought about becoming a duck?” It takes a light-hearted approach to reading such tedious (for some) concepts such as circular logic, relative truth, a priori statements, etc. Really, it is a quick read that is funny, worth reading, and a clever twist on non-fiction!

A course in philosophy via jokes
Two Harvard philosophy majors have written a funny, satirical look at their chosen vocation. They discuss Western philosophy including logic, existentialism, ethics, and language. Philosophy can sometimes be a deep, dreary subject (especially when discussing Sartre or Nietzsche) but this book makes it fun.

Unfocused
In this small book, Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein purport to teach “philosophy through jokes,” but the effort falls flat. Though the authors seem to believe in their own premise, the jokes only rarely have more than the most tenuous connection to the philosophical principle at hand, and as such are not very effective illustrations.

The book’s length also works against it: the authors have crammed a lot into the 200 undersized pages, but this means each idea gets only minimal space. Hence, the descriptions try to put everything into as few words as possible, resulting in a lot of text that is, if not confusing, at least not very inviting for a philosophical amateur. Someone who has taken one or two philosophy courses may have better luck following the explanations, but at that point, the reader may already know more than the book has to teach. All of this makes the intended audience somewhat unclear.

The most helpful thing here might be the glossary, which takes all of the major concepts in the book and distills each one down to one or two clear, concise sentences–but these five pages alone are hardly worth the purchase price. “Plato” has a smattering of decent gags (the timeline of philosophical history, also in the back, might be the funniest thing in the book), but on the whole it tries to do too much and ends up not doing anything very well.