PDF Ebook The Philosopher at the End of the Universe: Philosophy Explained Through Science Fiction Films, by Mark Rowlands
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The Philosopher at the End of the Universe: Philosophy Explained Through Science Fiction Films, by Mark Rowlands
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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.
- Sales Rank: #557098 in Books
- Published on: 2004-08-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.58" h x 1.06" w x 5.68" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
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
Review
“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
"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)
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Terrific
By Cosmoetica
Most books on philosophy are a bore because a) unlike art, which is ideas in motion, philosophy is merely ideas (no matter how wonderful nor complex they may be), and b) most philosophers (who claim that title in primacy) are simply bad writers- the two most notable exceptions to that rule being Plato and Friedrich Nietszche. And one of the main reasons why most philosophers are bad writers is that they eschew the notion that good writing (or good art, for that matter) has to entertain, as well as enlighten. Often the medicine must be put into a sugar lump, or, the exact opposite way the modern publishing industry, and Hollywood studios, work.
A notable exception to this comes in the form of a 2003 book by philosopher Mark Rowlands, called The Philosopher At The End Of The Universe: Philosophy Explained Through Science Fiction Films, which takes its name from the Douglas Adams book, The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, part of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. The book takes the novel approach of explaining some of the basic `big' problems of philosophy via some of Hollywood's biggest sci fi smashes. While Rowlands admits, early on, that he is no great wordsmith, in the sense of being able to craft prose that poesizes itself into the nooks and crannies of mind and soul (thus I will not be quoting from it, as I would merely be recapitulating the same things available in the Modern Library's European Philosophers From Descartes To Nietszche), his book is well written in the most prosaic sense. It is concise, cogent, and witty. There is precious little waste in the small book's 258 pages (excluding a glossary of handy philosophic terminology).
While I would have liked to have seen the inclusion of such sci fi classics as Star Trek, The Planet Of The Apes, Solaris, Forbidden Planet, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, for all of those films and series raise serious philosophic queries, none of them has an overarching theme, the way some of the films Rowlands describes (decidedly lesser films, but better didactic examples of simply laid out problems) do, for they are necessarily more complex and multifarious, as well as being more grounded in purely scientific (or sociological), rather than just philosophic, conundra....Overall, the book entertains and uses the idea of the films in service to the idea, while sometimes the reverse might have been the better approach. Although he disdains arts films, one cannot help but wonder what Rowlands would make of some of the classics of Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Mizoguchi, Angelopoulos, and films that do not merely reflect a philosophic idea(l), but immanently employ it. Nonetheless, The Philosopher At The End Of The Universe is one of the best primers on the world of ideas that I've ever read, making a nutritious meal out of the junk food of Hollywood; i.e.- getting something from nothing, creatio ex nihilo. Oh, wait, now that's theology. One wonders the filmic references a book like that could make!
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
A New Genre: Sci-Phi
By James E. Mahon
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.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
See the Movies in a Whole New Light!
By J. Baynie
This was a great book.
It made me appreciate these movies on a whole new level, (with the exception of the Matrix which I now enjoy for the FIRST time!)
By applying philosophical concepts to movies the author brilliantly breaks them down into proverbial 'apples & oranges'. Be warned though... once you pick it up its hard to put down half way through a chapter! So allow the time!
If I had to have a criticism it would be that some (maybe one, two at most) chapters go a little into overkill... but hey! Better a little more than a little less.
Hope this guy writes another book along similar lines!
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