The Philosopher at the End of the Universe: Philosophy Explained Through Science Fiction Films - Hardcover

Rowlands, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312322348 ISBN 13: 9780312322342

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004

Synopsis

The Philosopher at the End of the Universe demonstrates how anyone can grasp the basic concepts of philosophy while still holding a bucket of popcorn. Mark Rowlands makes philosophy utterly relevant to our everyday lives and reveals its most potent messages using nothing more than a little humor and the plotlines of some of the most spectacular, expensive, high-octane films on the planet.

Learn about: The Nature of Reality from The Matrix, Good and Evil from Star Wars, Morality from Aliens, Personal Identity from Total Recall, The Mind-Body dilemma from Terminator, Free Will from Minority Report, Death and the Meaning of Life from Blade Runner, and much more. A search for knowledge about ourselves and the world around us with a star-studded cast that includes: Tom Cruise, Plato, Harrison Ford, Immanuel Kant, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigourney Weaver, Rene? Descartes, and Keanu Reeves.

Rowlands anchors his discussions in easily understood everyday terms and relates them in a manner easy to identify with. Interspersed with a ready joke or two, he wonderfully explains why those SciFi movies we love so much are much deeper than they appear to be on the surface. Mark Rowlands's entertaining and stimulating guide is perfect for anyone searching for knowledge of the world around us.

If Keanu can understand Descartes surely everyone can.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Rowlands received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford and then went to work in the United States for seven years teaching philosophy. Victim of too many parties, he decided to move to Ireland to do nothing except write philosophy and surf. Seven years later he moved to Devon, where he currently works as the director of the Centre for Philosophical Social Sciences at the University of Exeter. He is the author of seven previous philosophy books including The Body in Mind, The Nature of Consciousness, and Animals Like Us.

From the Back Cover

“Rowlands succeeds in his aims remarkably well. Not only is each chapter a model of philosophical exposition, conveying philosophical ideas with exemplary verve and clarity, the book also manages to connect the philosophy to the movies in a natural and convincing way.... The irreverent style combines the folksy with the rigorous, the shallow with the deep – and philosophy needs all the humor it can get.”
- Times Literary Supplement (U.K.)

"Rowlands has a light touch. . . . Overall, this manages to be diverting without destroying too many brain cells, which is probably what you want from a holiday read."
- The Guardian (U.K.)

"Hugely entertaining. . . . Rowlands knows his stuff and marries some of the tougher philosophical arguments to the more accessible conduit of popular entertainment . . . enjoyable and illuminating."
- Waterstone's Books Quarterly (U.K.)

"The discussions are serious, but the tone of the book is irreverent; there are laughs for both newcomers and old hands."
- www.listology.com

"Some bits made me laugh out loud. . . . He has an excellent way of explaining complex ideas and terms. After reading quite a lot of Nietzsche (in my wayward youth especially) I think that Rowlands does a better way at explaining him than the man himself!"
- www.scifimoviepage.com

Reviews

All the revelations of a college survey course on philosophy can be easily gleaned from a few science fiction films. At least that’s the premise of this thoroughly entertaining conversation starter by philosophy professor Rowlands, who explicates the musings of some of philosophy’s biggest stars within the context of cinema’s most enduring sci-fi hits. Under Rowlands’s guidance, these films shed light on such abstruse philosophical ideas as the "the problem of free will" and "death and the meaning of life." For example, the great lesson of Frankenstein is not that life can originate only from a divine creator, Rowlands says. Rather, the monster, a creature unable to choose his physical nature, his parents or his future, actually embodies the existential dilemmas explored by Heidegger, Sartre and Camus. In a particularly winning chapter on Star Wars, Rowlands compares the musings of Plato and Nietzsche, conjecturing that evil is not the absence of good but, rather, a contrast necessary in order for good to exist. (That is, Darth Vader is nothing without Obi-Wan and vice versa.) Rowlands recommends that readers watch each film before plunging into the corresponding chapter. And he makes no apologies for his "lowbrow" intellectual diversions into such crowd pleasers as Total Recall (a celluloid essay on memory theory and identity), Hollow Man (a meditation on moral vs. "prudent" choices) and The Matrix (a Cartesian daydream). Rowlands frequently injects his own thoughts with self-deprecating charm. His combination of humor and erudition produces an engaging read, delightful in its tone and accessible in its prose, that affirms the wisdom of numerous armchair philosophers who have declared that everything you need to know about life can be learned from the movies.
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Irish philosopher Rowlands adopts a mildly smart-alecky persona for this Philosophy 101-type foray that uses "sci-fi" flickers to illustrate questions of meaning, knowledge, identity, free will, morality, and death. Frankenstein--actually, Kenneth Brannagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein-- serves to tease out the meaning of life as absurdity, a result of the discrepancy between interior and exterior perspectives on the self. Because of the same inside-outside clash--the rock, Rowlands says, on which all philosophical positions founder--certain knowledge proves elusive: see The Matrix. The mind-body problem (see The Terminator) and the concept of personal identity (Total Recall) come to ends similar, respectively, to those of the issues of meaning and knowledge. Only when the issue is "Why be moral?" are the bonds of rationality slipped; act according to your conscience, Rowlands, along with Nietzsche, counsels. While arguing by inference (they star in so many philosophically intriguing films) that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Keanu Reeves be hailed as actor-philosophers, Rowlands effectively covers an astonishing number of essential thinkers and positions, meanwhile betraying only individualist and antireligious biases. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312322348
• ISBN 13: 9780312322342
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288