8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A New Genre: Sci-Phi, November 22, 2004
This review is from: The Philosopher at the End of the Universe: Philosophy Explained Through Science Fiction Films (Hardcover)
Let me begin by saying that I met the author, Mark Rowlands, on several occasions while he was teaching at University College, Cork, in Ireland. Let me also say that I was extremely jealous when I first came across this book in a bookshop in Cambridge, England. For years I have shown my students clips from science-fiction films such as "The Matrix" (re: Descartes's first Meditation) and "The Terminator" (re: machines without sensation -- Descartes again) and "Total Recall" (re: Descartes's first Meditation again, and Locke's memory theory of identity) when teaching my Modern Philosophy course. But Rowlands beat the rest of us to it and wrote a book in this vein -- an introduction to philosophy by way of popular science-fiction films.
This Winter Term (2005), for the second year in a row, I will be assigning this book for my Modern Philosophy course. (Last time I had to order the books from England; this time they are available in the US). In 2004 my students enjoyed the book tremendously and it proved very useful, especially the sections on Descartes (chapters 2 and 3 on skepticism about the external world and the mind-body problem -- "The Matrix" and "The Terminator"), Locke (chapter 4 on personal identity -- "Total Recall" and "The Sixth Day") and Hume (chapter 5 on free will -- "Minority Report").
The author, Rowlands, is known best for his work in the philosophy of mind and applied ethics (especially the ethical status of animals). I believe that the earlier parts of the book, dealing with philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology, are easily the best. The final parts of the book dealing with ethics -- chapter 6 on "Hollow Man" (why should we be ethical?), chapter 7 on "Independence Day" and "Aliens" (should the scope of ethics extend to aliens?) and chapter 8 on "Star Wars" (good vs. evil) -- are not quite up to standard. Somewhere in between, standard-wise, are the parts dealing with the meaning of life -- chapter 1 on "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" and chapter 9 on "Blade Runner".
The book is written primarily for undergraduates. It normally does a nice job of presenting philosophical ideas and problems in an appealing and direct fashion. You can tell that the author is part of the generation that grew up watching Star Wars and then Buffy, but has a D.Phil from Oxford and can write about supervenience or Doug Lenat's CYC project.
This makes it all sound far too serious and educational, however. The most important thing about this book is that it is funny. It's funny about philosophy, and it's funny about films too. Exhibit A: ""Minority Report"... also has Tom Cruise in it, not a man you normally associate with complex philosophical issues. I mean, scientology? Give me a break." (p. 121) Rowlands is nothing if not irreverent, and you will laugh out loud while reading this.
So far, I have found only a few factual errors (references are to the English Ebury Press 2003 paperback edition). Heidegger's "Being and Time" was published in 1927, not 1926 (p. 7). Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-philosophicus" was completed in 1918 and published in 1921, not published in 1916 (p. 53). And the Cameron Crowe movie starring Tom Cruise is "Vanilla Sky", not "Vanilla Skies" (p. 121). The only philosophical error I have found is that he refers to Occasionalism as "parallelism" (p. 72) (parallelism is a different position and can be espoused by a Dual Aspect theorist such as Spinoza). But that is just something discussed in a footnote.
I am usually not happy with Rowlands' quick resolutions of various matters in the final sections of his chapters. But it would be unfair to beat him over the head about this. I also find some of the humor to be too laddish for my taste. It's not particularly funny to say how much you love beer and imagined sex with Sarah Michelle Gellar, and it becomes painful to say it the n-th time. But these are minor criticims of a refreshing read, on the whole.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sic-fi movies are revealing, April 25, 2008
This review is from: The Philosopher at the End of the Universe: Philosophy Explained Through Science Fiction Films (Hardcover)
Just finished reading the book The Philosopher at the End of the Universe by Mark Rowlands. The feature of the book is that it uses many sci-fi movies to elaborate on the various theories of philosophy, making the dry subjects much more interesting to read. The author said that the book is equivalent to university year one course on philosophy. I did not study philosopher in college. So comments from those who know better are welcome. The theories discussed include the meaning of life, reality, identity, free will and morality. Each topic has one or two chapters and relates to a movie.
One of the topics I like is on reality. The author refers this to the movies Matrix trilogy where the perceived reality was actually a virtual world projected by a computer with intelligence to the minds of captive men. It is not simply a case of virtual reality. A normal human in the movie spent the entire life in the world falsely created for him and never knew anything else, so to him it was the real world. There was a paradox in that Keanu Reeves was Mr Anderson in the virtual world, but he was also Neo who fought kung fu in the virtual world. In the last episode, we saw Agent Smith transformed into a person in the "real" world. This called into question which is the real and which is the virtual world.
The concept was not created by the Wachowski brothers. I recall seeing several movies deploying the same concept. There is Existenze where players entered a virtual reality game. There is also the Thirteenth Floor where a laboratory resided there worked on virtual reality so real that a murder was committed inside the virtual world; it then turned out that the laboratory was actually a virtual reality created by another group of supreme scientists.
The concept of reality, or the lack of it, dated back to 300 BC from the Greek philosopher Pyrrho who said that it was impossible for human to know things in their own nature. We also know well the story of Chuang Tzu at about the same time (300 BC) on the dream of the butterfly, where he questioned whether the butterfly was the dream of Chuang Tzu, or Chuang Tzu was the dream of the butterfly.
The thought was made famous by Rene Descartes of the seventeenth century. He proposed that it is possible what we call the world does not really exist; that it is merely a dream. Descartes hypothesized that the world could be ruled by an evil demon who is very powerful and decides to deceive all mankind for fun. All we perceive through our senses are only what the evil demon makes us believe. In fact, nothing of what we believe is true. Indeed there is no world as such, as every feature of the world is supplied by the demon in trickery. Descartes was arguing for the theory of scepticism, which is a view that we cannot have any real knowledge. We may think there is a world around us, but we really don't know it at all; we merely believe it very strongly.
However, this is not the goal of Descartes' argument. Having proposed the possibility that we could be tricked in all our senses, he went on to state that there is only one thing we could be absolutely sure: our existence, so that we are able to be sceptical; thus the famous expression Cognito, ergo sum, or in English I think, therefore I am. The author specifically clarified that "it does not mean anything silly like we exist only as long as we think". The main point is: we can think of the possibility that the world is not real, but we cannot think that we do not exist, the reason being we must exist to do the thinking. Or, doubting our existence automatically guarantees our existence, because otherwise we could not be around to do the doubting. Not matter how much the evil demon tries to deceive us, unless we exist he cannot be deceiving us. The conclusion drawn by Descartes is one on dualism, that the body and the soul are two different entities.
But the dust has not settled and there are problems with the claim that I think, therefore I am. The nineteenth century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche identified the problem. He proposed that the existence of self could just be a collection of thoughts, and some of the thoughts were thoughts to the effect that these thoughts belong to a certain person. But there need to be no person at all. All that is needed is the thoughts that all these thoughts belong to the same person. Nietzsche argued that all we can really be certain of is that there are thoughts, we cannot be certain of the existence of the person to whom the thoughts belongs. This point was made earlier by another philosopher David Hume that when we look in on ourselves, all we find are various mental states, i.e. thoughts, beliefs, desires, feelings, emotions, but we do not come across any self or person who has these mental states. So there is still a possibility that ourself and the world we sense, do not really exist. We are just made believed by the evil demon of Descartes, or we are actually in the Matrix.
The author quoted a scene where Neo met the turbaned boy engaging in spoon-bending action. Boy: Try not to bend the spoon, for that is impossible. Instead, try to realize the truth. Neo: What is that? Boy: That there is no spoon. Then instead of bending the spoon, you see that what is really bending is yourself.
Spoon-bending with the mind is a phenomenon reported many times in our world. So are we living in a real world and can we realize the truth? Philosophers stop short of providing an answer.
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