The Simpsons and Philosophy

March 1, 2001
In Irwin's earlier anthology, Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book About Everything and Nothing (1999), a team of philosophy professors offered an introduction to Plato, Kierkegaard and other major thinkers via the characters and plots of the TV sitcom. Now Irwin and company have regrouped to focus on Matt Groening's popular, long-running animated series, The Simpsons. Noting that Groening studied philosophy in college, they hasten to add that this is not an attempt to explore meanings intended by Groening and the show's artists and writers. "Rather, we're highlighting the philosophical significance of The Simpsons as we see it," declares the editorial trio. Each essay provides a hilarious but incisive springboard to some aspect of philosophy. Can we learn something about the nature of happiness from the unhappy, miserly Mr. Burns? What are Springfield's sexual politics? What makes Bart Simpson a Heideggerian thinker? Could Bart be the Nietzschean ideal? These are the kind of "meaty philosophical issues" TV viewers can expect to find covered by the 21 contributors to this entertaining book, with interpretations drawn from the works of Sartre, Kant, Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes and others. Appendixes include a time line of the major philosophers referred to and a chronological guide of the episode titles and original air dates spanning 11 seasons of The Simpsons. (Apr.) Forecast: Seinfeld and Philosophy prompted Entertainment Weekly's review comment, "Wish we'd had this in college." Fans of The Simpsons are certain to find this book to be the perfect rebuttal for those who dismiss the show as a no-brainer.

April 15, 2001
Does Homer Simpson embody the Socratic ideal of virtue? Sadly, no, but in one of 18 essays on the long-running cartoon series, Raja Halwani investigates, from a Socratic perspective, why we all find Homer so humorous and charming. From "Thus Spake Bart," an essay comparing Bart, the bad boy of Springfield, and Nietzsche, philosophy's ultimate bad boy, to explication of the aesthetic philosophy of the allusions the show is famous for making, the book is consistently successful. Even the impenetrable Immanuel Kant becomes outright hilarious in a rollicking analysis of the virtue of duty in Springfield. " The Simpsons" has received serious attention in the past, most notably David Foster Wallace's analysis of Simpsonian meta-irony in " A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (1997). Like Wallace's book, these pieces make erudite concepts accessible by viewing things through the lens of a great cartoon series. Perhaps " The Simpsons"(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)