The jokes are quite good - but the philosophy is mostly highly superficial ( )

I picked up Plato and a Platypus... on a whim, an impulse buy as I was heading out of a Barnes & Noble one day. I think the orange cover caught my eye, and then a quick scan of the subject matter piqued my curiosity. Jokes? I like jokes. Philosophy? I don't know much about it, but it always seemed like something I *should* know more about, something I would like to know more about. So I brought it home and started flipping through it.

I'm amazed at how much enjoyment I got out of it. First of all, a couple of the jokes I had to bring around to the wife and tell her. A couple of gems in there. (Mostly not, but that wasn't the point of the book. Besides, pick up any book of jokes - and I've picked up my share - and you'll know that it's mostly a collection of banality surrounding a couple of great knee-slappers.)

But mostly I enjoyed how the humor taught me a little about each different school of philosophy discussed. I can't say I'm walking away an expert in any of them, but I'm certainly a little more enlightened now. ( )

Very entertaining book on CD - we listened to this while driving down to the coast for Thanksgiving. I ended up buying tthe book on CD for my dad because he was a Philosophy major and doesn't have the attention span for reading much anymore. The jokes are funny and do a great job of demonstrating the principles. ( )

This book succeeds in making philosophy interesting. It takes the basic categories of philosophy—existence, knowledge, government, ethics, etc.—and illuminates them by telling jokes.

I bought this book as a light read during summer holidays and loved it. It made me laugh out loud, and added a few jokes to my arsenal. It had an other interesting side-effect, though: its broad overview of philosophy helped to clarify the major schools of thought in my mind. The glossary contributed significantly to this. It was written in such a witty manner that it compels you to read it. (I can't ever remember reading a glossary before!)

Buy it for the knowledge or the humour—you will not be disappointed. ( )

This book offers a brief introduction to Philosophy through a series of well-chosen jokes. Systematically, Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein offer a glimpse of different philosophical schools within large categories: Metaphysics, Logic, and so on.

The heart of this exercise is the number of jokes that the author's claim highlight philosophical principles, exposing the underlying logic of logical fallacies and classifying the different sorts of epistemology. The descriptions of the various philosophical ideas are brief and to the point and the jokes are well-contextualized; even better, the jokes are pretty good.

This is a breezy romp through philosophical concepts by authors who understand their subject matter. While it isn't the type of book that's likely to provide a good undergirding of philosophy, it is a book that can provide a handy resource whenever philosophical questions arise (and think of how often that is). ( )