From our book review: https://thebeerthrillers.com/2023/07/24/book-review-futurama-and-philosophy-edit...

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Philosophers in Space

Futurama and Philosophy is the 78th entry into the “…and Philosophy” series. It started many years ago with “Seinfeld in Philosophy” and has ballooned from there covering a wide range of topics from Baseball, Jeopardy, Lady Gaga, to Futurama, Batman, Marvel Movies / Marvel Universe, to Curb Your Enthusiasm and much much more.

I do enjoy the series for what it is. Each book is a collection of essays looking at their particular topic (in this case Futurama) through the lens of philosophy. The articles are hit or miss, just as the writers themselves are. But overall its pretty entertaining / interesting stuff.

We have previously covered the Curb Your Enthusiasm volume here: Curb Your Enthusiasm and Philosophy Book Review.

If you are looking for more philosophy book reviews, you can find that we have covered quite a bit – from The Philosophy of Snoopy to On Bullshit. (I’ll link them at the end of the article in a list to make it easier.)

As I said about this type of book – the essays can be hit or miss. Luckily this edition is more hit than miss. They do a good job of doing a deep dive into the characters, some of the settings and the make up of the Futurama universe, as well as things like robot ethics, freedom, “sexlexia”, and much more.

The Zapp Brannigan “sexlexia” article while being somewhat interesting discussing the inadequacies of each of the characters when it comes to sex, doesn’t really offer a whole lot of philosophical insight. And this kind of brings to light how these “… and Philosophy” books kind of work. They tend to either be more heavily bent on discussing the particular matter (in this case Futurama) and typically attempting to be humorous, or they come across too heavily focused on the philosophy and lose sight of the source material to a degree. I feel like its an unfortunate ‘nature of the beast’ as far as these collections go. As much as I love philosophy and love Futurama or Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm or whatever the particular book is about, its too hard to truly weave source material with philosophy and keep it engaging for both crowds.

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Read more here: https://thebeerthrillers.com/2023/07/24/book-review-futurama-and-philosophy-edit... ( )

I love the concept of these "pop culture and philosophy" books. They seem to promise such a nifty combination of things. An analysis of various themes in stories I love from a philosophical point of view, combined with the use of something entertaining and accessible that I already enjoy to explain complicated philosophical concepts? As Bender would say, sounds like fun on a bun! But the actual result, at least in this case, is... well, it's okay, I guess. The best of the essays (like the one on Popplers and the ethics of meat-eating, or the one on time travel paradoxes) give a decent, if very broad and very brief, overview of their subject matter in a way that feels genuinely relevant to the show, without sucking all the humor out of it. Some of the weakest, on the other hand, seem to mostly just be explaining social commentary jokes I got perfectly well the first time. (And then there's that essay on Hegel. I don't know what that one's doing. It does not appear to be using words in any of the ways in which words are actually used by human beings.) Most of them are somewhere in-between, though. Vaguely interesting, perhaps, but shallow at best. And very few of them introduced me to any ideas that were genuinely new to me. Likely the collection as a whole is a bit more worthwhile if it's your first-ever introduction to philosophical thinking, and you really want that spoonful of pop cultural sugar to swallow it down with. ( )