Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar
Harvard Magazine reviews a very unusual sounding book "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes" by Tom Cathcart and Daniel Klein
Together they bucked the fashion of Harvard’s philosophy department, which considered existentialism softheaded, and got onto a jag of existential ethics for a time. “We were going around being obnoxious about what was an ‘authentic’ life versus an ‘inauthentic’ life,” says Klein.
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Nearly half a century later, those epistemological theories, truth tables, and falsifiable propositions have borne fruit in Cathcart and Klein’s new book, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar...: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes (Abrams). Consider it Philosophy 101 as taught by Jackie Mason. A philosophical fallacy like post hoc ergo propter hoc—assigning a causal role to something simply because it preceded something else...
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