Rating:  -
I am a huge fan of the Simpsons but found this book to be slightly boring and some chapters read more like a text book for a college class. I LOVED the book "The Gospel According to the Simpsons" which I read straight through without putting down. I guess religion just interests me more (hence why I gave this book only three stars). If you love the Simpsons, philosophy, and can follow what the authors are talking about you will love this book.
Rating:  -
It's been said by many great men that everything everywhere has the capacity to teach us something. Even fools can be instructive. We may not like the teacher, but that doesn't devalue the lesson.
Well, The Simpsons is a teacher that virtually anyone could love. One of America's most subversive and enduring shows, it has long been recognized that The Simpsons is much more than a child's playground of primary colors. This is a show that marries incisive wit with low-brow sight gags, obscure cultural allusions with puerile puns. It's a mine of meaning, dressed in a Just A Cartoon coat.
"The Simpsons and Philosophy" takes the extended exploits of Homer and company (up to the 12th season) and digs out as many nuggets of intellectual gold as there are to find, and it turns out there are a lot. Maggie's silence, Bart's bad-boy-ness, sexual politics, hyper-irony, the nuclear family, and what little Aristotealian virtues (if any) there are to be found in Homer himself: they all spark insightful and shrewd debate.
The book, however, should've been called "Philosophy and The Simpsons." There are a few essays where the show is the foreground of the philosophical thought that is dissected and analyzed (such as Irwin and Lombardo's brief treatise on allusions, or Wallace's Marxist evaluation of the show's almost unclassifiable sense of humor), but most of the essays treat the show as a source of convenient syllogisms to help bolster ideas that seem almost beside the point (among these, most acutely, is Jolley's closing essay on the nature of thought -- a dry, thoroughly technical affair that has almost nothing to do whatsoever with Groening's funny, yellow family).
Because this is philosophy (and philosophers) we're talking about, don't expect the sort of amusement to be found in a half-hour block of the Fox television show. It might even be worth pointing out that "a-muse," defined by its roots, means "un-thinking." Although The Simpsons has the versatility to appeal to a broad spectrum of brainiacs and boobs (although not in equal measure, I'd argue), this is certainly a thinking person's book, and to those with patience, an appetite for profundity, and the understanding that wisdom can even come from fools like Homer, well, it's bound to inspire thought of your own.
Rating: -
The Simpsons have endured as one of the most popular TV families in the world, despite some of the most vociferous criticisms that you could level at a programme. As much as some hate it, there are those love it to the same degree. Finally, a bunch of philosophers have taken "The Simpsons" seriously enough to write a book about it.
The 18 essays contained in "The Simpsons and Philosophy" cover a broad range of topics. Everything from Kant, Aristotle, Neitzsche to semiotics, (I didn't even know what that was until this book!), get mentioned. Although a couple of essays deal with the same philosophical bent, (Aristotle pops up a couple of times), there isn't the overload that has appeared in other volumes in this series, (such as Plato's cave in "The Matrix and Philosophy").
I am no great fan of the Simpsons, but I do rather enjoy the quirky humour. However, even for the non-fan, this book really highlights the complexity of the Simpsons and what the programme has to say, (or not say, as the case may be). In a programme that could be easily dismissed as innane, there is a suprising smorgasboard of philoshical ideas that would keep even Homer in the middle of a feeding frenzy happy.
Rating: -
Sometimes the most difficult matters can be presented in a funny way. It's good to reflect about philosophy in our daily life. So, if you like philosophy, if you like to think, if you see the Simpsons, and if you don't have enough time to take seriously Kant (to read Kritik der reinen Vernunft), that's your book.
Rating: -
Before all those others in the now-massive "Popular Culture and Philosophy" books series, there was The Simpsons and Philosophy. The Simpsons is one of the few shows which can legitimately lay claim to having an affinity for philosophy, and the contributing writers of this collection of essays do a good job with it. Don't get me wrong, this is a good book (I've even taught a college course using this very book) -- there are several great essays, some good ones, but there are a few clunkers as well. But overall, this book really is a must-read for any fans of the show who have ever wanted to think about The Simpsons in a more intellectual light.
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