Philosophy and Terry Pratchett by Jacob Held

Philosophy and Terry Pratchett Reviews

• 
  D.L. Morrese

  There are thirteen essays by different authors in this collection. One or two of them focus, at least in part, on the philosophical ideas contained or implied in the pages of Sir Terry's novels. The rest tend to use cherry-picked excerpts from the novels to expound on the philosophical positions of lesser thinkers, such as Hegel, Aristotle, Augustine, and Kant. (That's kind of a joke, but only kind of.)
  
  There are some simple mistakes (like the essay that says that Tomjon was a blood relative of King Verence I. He wasn't, although he was the queen's son (wink wink). Neither the king nor Tomjon knew this). There is the essay that uses Death's well known conversation with Susan near the end of Hogfather to support Existentialism. (I think the author really missed the point about humans occupying the place 'where the falling angel meets the rising ape' on this). The worst offender, however, is the fifth essay, which is largely about economics. It views the unregulated commercial policies of Ankh Morpork as support for libertarianism, a lack of concern for the poor, and the acceptance of pollution as a trivial consequence of free enterprise. Does the author not understand what satire is or that Discworld is fantasy? Showing a polluted river and smog, beggars making the most out of living under a bridge, or a poor little match girl dying in the snow (Hogfather), does not imply that these things are just fine. The reader is already supposed to understand that such things are not desirable and therefor question if the policies that bring them about are sound. Discworld isn't a philosophical or economic treatise, and it's not dark fiction. It doesn't dwell on misery. Discworld is humorous fantasy with a fair amount of satire. The characters soldier on because that's what people do, but this doesn't imply that everything about their fictional world is acceptable.
  
  I shelled out $25 for this because it seemed right up my alley. (I have a degree in philosophy and I'm a Pratchett fan.) The book is especially disappointing because it could have been so much better. It also would have been a good idea for the editors to run the final draft past the great man himself.
• 
  Eustacia Tan

  3.5 stars, rounded up to 4
  
  I read this on a long bus trip, and found out that it's not light enough to be travel reading material - I will definitely have to reread this one day to more fully absorb everything.
  
  Anyway, Philosophy & Terry Pratchett is a collection of essays divided into four categories:
  1. Self-perception, Narrative and Identity (4 essays)
  2. Social and Political Philosophy (3 essays)
  3. Ethics and the Good Life (4 essays)
  4. Logics and metaphysics. (2 essays)
  
  Some essays read like an essay analysing Discworld, while others read as though Discworld was added to a discussion on philosophy. On the whole, though, I found parts two and three to be the most interesting ones, although that's probably because of the topic than the writing style. In particular, essays on the Witches on Lancre and Death tended to be the most interesting ones, no matter which category they were in.
  
  You won't need to have an understand of philosophy to read this, though it will be helpful, but you'll want to have read most (if not all) of all the Discworld books before reading this. I haven't read a few and didn't get the reference to certain plot elements.
  
  This is review is rather short but there isn't much to say. If you're a Discworld fan and are interested in exploring the different ways that we can view the Disc, then there's a good chance that you'll be interested in it (assuming you don't mind some academic language).
  
  This review was first posted to
  Inside the mind of a Bibliophile
• 
  Kokay Maramot

  It is only expected that any book that has a title that says PHILOSOPHY AND INSERT POP CULTURE PHENOMENON HERE will be met with suspicion among the laymen. After all, what’s a philosopher but “someone who’s bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting”.
  
  You get the feeling that they’re just making things up.
  
  And most of those books with the title that says PHILOSOPHY AND INSERT POP CULTURE PHENOMENON HERE sometimes do really just make things up. Even when the source material is too thin or too mundane to even be considered worthy of brain cycles.
  
  But not Terry Pratchett and his Discworld. Not beloved series Discworld whose breadth, depth and range of possible philosophical musings could give any professional philosopher a run for their money.
  
  
  Philosophy and Terry Pratchett, Published 2014
  When I showed Philosophy and Terry Pratchett around (shout out to Discworld Monthly folks on Facebook), It was met with uneven feedback and it’s not hard to see why.
  
  Philosophy and Terry Pratchett is a collection of 13 essays that presents Discworld (and other books by Terry Pratchett) through a philosophical lens. What does Discworld say about gender identity? Does Lord Vetinari intuitively channel Friederich Hayek on the administration of Ankh-Morpork? What can we learn about ethics from Death? And also what in all of Dungeons Dimension monstrosity does Modal Realism got to do with a world being Disc shaped? These are just a few of the topics discussed in the book. There are many more that might help you rethink those stories you’ve loved all these years, certain themes that made you think for a while but without the philosopher’s tools, was left unrealized. And on that note, I find this volume a great help.
  
  There is bound to be a few articles that are a bit tenuous, but mostly it is well thought out. Many articles stood out for me. Those articles are worth having this book on your shelf. And it wouldn’t hurt if you entertain the idea that Sir Terry Pratchett may have created a more complex world than the one that is supported by four giant elephants on top of a giant turtle. Or maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s the finger that does the pointing that matters. Or maybe there’s no finger at all. I’m no longer sure. You shouldn’t muck about philosophy at three in the morning!
  
  But there you go. For folks who love Discworld and wants to know if this book’s got it or not, well it’s got it, but we all know of course that there’s more to the Disc than can be thought of in our philosophy.
  
  TheManilaReader.com
• 
  Marek Pawlowski

  Całkiem ciekawy zbiór artykułów poruszających problemy filozoficzne, które możemy znaleźć u Pratchetta. Oczywiście jak w większości tego typu pozycji, autorzy wybrali drobne elementy z jego prac i nadbudowali na tym cały merytoryczny sens swojego artykułu naukowego. Mówiąc prościej, filozofię w dziełach Pratchetta tworzy to, że opisy sytuacyjne i cytaty z jego książek są używane do omówienia głębszych, bardziej skomplikowanych zagadnień. Pomimo tego warto przeczytać tę pozycję, w szczególności dla trzech artykułów, które wykorzystują te opisy w naprawdę niezwykły sposób, a mianowicie: „Feigning to Feign: Pratchett and the Maskerade”, „On the Possibility of Discworld”, „A golem is not born, but Rather Becomes a Woman: Gender on the Disc”. Oczywiście inne artykuły także są warte przejrzenia. Z czystym sumieniem można tę książkę polecić każdemu, choć dla osób z filozoficznym wykształceniem powinno się dodać klauzulę: „traktujcie to z lekkim przymrużeniem oka a będziecie się dobrze bawić”.
  
  It is quite an interesting set of articles that is focused on some philosophical problems that we can find in Terry Pratchett’s books. Of course as in the most of that kind of works the authors choose one insignificant or less significant part of someone else’s books and try to build on it the whole substantive sense of a scientific article. Simply speaking this is called the philosophy of Pratchett only because some examples from his book are given when the authors are discussing more complicated problems. Nevertheless this book is worth reading especially for three articles in which the extracts from Pratchett’s books are used in an amazing way, namely: “Feigning to Feign: Pratchett and the Maskerade”, “On the Possibility of Discworld”, “A golem is not born, but Rather Becomes a Woman: Gender on the Disc”. Of course other articles are also readable. With a clear conscience I can recommend this work but for people with a philosophical degree I will add only one clause: “don’t take it too seriously and you will enjoy it”.
  
• 
  BookishWordish

  Overall I was quite impressed.
  
  Some essays were clearly just using Discworld as a cover for talking more generally about various philosophical concepts- which is fine for me, because I quite enjoy (most) philosophy.
  
  But some essays were engaging with Discworld in interesting ways, really digging into the characters and ideas Pratchett was writing about. Some of the essays on Granny Weatherwax, Hogfather, and Monstrous Regiment were very strong.
• 
  Rebecca

  A great and interesting read for anyone who is fascinated by Terry Pratchett's Discworld.
• 
  William Schram

  Philosophy & Terry Pratchett is a collection of essays that connect Terry Pratchett’s Discworld with common Philosophical Quandaries and how Pratchett goes and views the solutions. Drawing from a wide range of Pratchett’s material along with a wide swath of regular philosophical works makes this book really fun to read.
  
  There are thirteen essays in all, focusing on different aspects of Philosophy as it is demonstrated in Pratchett’s novels. Each essay focuses on a different character or set of characters and how they show this or that quality. Basic questions that are answered are quandaries such as Gender Roles and what determines it in society, how to know what is good for you, what makes us human, and so on. Along the way, we meet famous philosophers like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beauvoir, Wittgenstein, and so on.
  
  So for example, there is a character that appears in Equal Rites named Eskarina Smith. On the Discworld, there is a tradition of the eighth son of an eighth son becoming a powerful wizard. However, Pratchett turns this on its head since Eskarina is female. Wizards aren’t female, there aren’t women wizards. Women become witches, not wizards. This is a view held by both sides, Granny Weatherwax attempts to teach magic to Eskarina using the ways of the witch, but is unsuccessful. Eskarina becomes accepted by the end of the novel though, and eventually becomes relatively puissant.
  
  Usually, in Pratchett’s works, there is a character that is living about their lives, and something changes in how they do things. Take the instance of Cheery Littlebottom, another case in the Gender Issues department. Cheery is a Dwarf. Now the thing you have to take from this is that Cheery is both female and a dwarf, which is something that is frowned upon by the other dwarves. It makes them uncomfortable to be confronted with this idea. It isn’t that female dwarves are nonexistent, it is just that they don’t have a word to go along with it. It puts things into a fascinating perspective.
  
  Along the way, we meet our favorite Anthropomorphic Personification, Death, and his battles with the Auditors, the Night Watch and how they deal with duty, the best way to disguise yourself when you are already in a costume and so on. This mostly applies to the Wizards, but it does apply to the Night Watch as well. Like if the Wizards want to disguise themselves they have to pretend to be wearing a false beard, which leads to a large amount of humor on my end.
  
  If you are a fan of Discworld or Terry Pratchett’s works, this is a great book. If you also happen to be a fan of Philosophy, this is a great book squared. Thus I would heartily recommend it to either or both.
• 
  Rachel

  This is a collection of critical essays analysing Terry Pratchett’s oeuvre in the context of the entirety of Western philosophical canon (or at least, the bits of it the authors liked/knew best). As is to be expected, the quality varies wildly, but it’s unfortunate from my perspective that it opens with the weakest essay in the collection, Gender on the Disc. All the authors have more or less facility with language compared to each other, and none have a great deal compared to professional writers, but this was very poor and the concepts were Gender 101.
  
  It picks up after that. I did have to laugh at just how many of them referenced the scene in Hogfather where Death talks about grinding up the universe and not finding a single molecule of mercy or justice – it’s a great, great scene, and very indicative of Pratchett’s philosophical stance, but I would argue that the scene in Carpe Jugulum when Granny Weatherwax talks about the greatest sin being treating people as things is far more important. It’s also echoed in various other places, notably Small Gods. I guess the Death scene is just that much easier to quote. Be warned, also, that the authors have no compunction about spoiling the plots wholesale, so if you haven’t read everything he’s written – including side titles like the Johnny Maxwell trilogy, which if you’re in this for Discworld and Discworld alone, you might not have – you’ll be caught out.
  
  Going through the book afterwards to see what passages I’d highlighted, I find most of them are Pratchett’s, or quotes from other philosophers (John Stuart Mill and Hayek v Vetinari: “pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.”)
  
  Guilfoy’s essay on Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy was thoughtful and interesting: “to paraphrase Socrates in the Meno, we shall be better, braver, and less helpless if we believe we succeed or fail by our own effort. This may be the most significant part of the libertarian fantasy in the Discworld novels.” He also does what some of the others fail to do, which is criticise Pratchett’s blind spots about the failings of the ethical systems he choses to espouse (not that it was Pratchett’s job to do so, but it’s certainly the job of a critic).
  
  Schotte’s essay on Plato, the Witch, and the Cave brought together a lot of strands – economic, psychologic and political – very successfully. My second favourite was Categorically Not Cackling by Fellows, which posits how the witches have overcome Nietzsche’s nihilism problem, was assured and very smart. I love the idea of Granny as the embodiment of Kant’s struggle between want and ought. Fellows again brings in the Hogfather scene, but with good justification, as an illustration of the way humans ‘invent’ morality and by doing so overcome nihilism. ‘How else can they become?’
  
  Perhaps because I read this on Christmas Eve, my favourite essay was Hogfather and the Existentialism of Kierkegaard, Hogfather being one of my top five Discworld novels. I knew precisely nothing about Kierkegaard going in and now I want to read him immediately. It probably jives with my current difficulty in finding the ‘fundamental project’ of a meaningful life, about which Kierkegaard was so concerned.
  
  Overall I’m very glad I read this and I learned a great deal. I hope more academic projects like this are done with Terry Pratchett, because they’ve surely exhausted Jane Eyre at this point.
• 
  Mark Barrett

  This is a series of short essays by different authors and, as such, is very up and down. The essays in the opening section (Self-perception...) are quite poor and almost put me off reading on. Part two (Social and political philosophy) is much better and contains some really interesting essays - Kevin Gilfoy’s is particularly good. Part 3 isn’t bad, but Martin Vasek’s contemplation on the existence of the Discworld in the final section is built on a poorly considered opening premise.
  
  I wouldn’t recommend reading this in one go as there is an over-reliance among several authors on a small number of Pratchett’s books; dare I say, his more problematic Discworld novels? (Hogfather, Thief of Time...)
  
  Some great essays to dip into over time, though.
  
  Oh, and I think Terry himself would hate this. He had a high disregard for literary historians, scholars and the like.
• 
  Roberta

  This is fascinating body of academic work on Pratchett, mostly focusing on his Discworld. There are themes of world-building, self-perception, narrative, social philosophy and politics, and ethics. All the studies are written well and ground Pratchett in centuries of philosophy. If I have any criticism for it, it is that it seems patchy in terms of level - some studies are easier to follow for the non-academic than others, reducing the possible readership, which is a pity since the theoretical explanations are not difficult to understand, and provide the Discworld with still further dimensions and parallels to the Roundworld.
• 
  Jeff

  I'm a little wary of books that purport to delve into the works of an author to analyse them to death, telling us exactly what the author had in mind as the book made it from mind to page.
  
  Fortunately, this isn't that kind of book. Instead, at least for the most part, this collection of essays uses examples from Pratchett's books to illustrate concepts from philosophy. Again for the most part, this leads to a succession of interesting discussions that are suitable for the non-philosopher.
  
  Actually, I remember my English teacher telling me that all of us should aim to be philosophers; we should all be looking to understand our lives and the way that the world works. That's the only extent to which I could be called a philosopher and I certainly found most of the essays interesting and, indeed, educational. The level of the essays is, however, uneven and scattered among the fascinating, the intriguing, and the simply interesting are a few that seemed ... unnecessarily abstract. Whether these last would seem so tedious to a real philosopher is, of course, another matter, though I doubt that the professional philosopher is the intended audience of this book.
  
  Why the book generally can be said to work is that the references to Pratchett's stories allow the authors to give concrete examples that are familiar to the Discworld readers rather than them having to rely upon theoretical situations; it adds a practicality, a depth to the discussions which could otherwise be missing. It does not, though, succeed because of Pratchett, and the Discworld fan should not read this book purely because of this element. The book remains, first and foremost, a book on philosophy and needs to be read as such.
• 
  Joe Crowe

  “The Discworld exists at the edge of reality as an impossible blip because the gods enjoy jokes as much as anyone else.”
  
  Terry Pratchett’s work is hilarious, thoughtful, clever and hilarious, in that order. The writers of this book delve into all of it, proving it’s also spiritual, philosophical and hilarious, in that order.

  
  I usually do not tell anyone not to read something, but in this case, I will – but only because you should read some of Pratchett’s stuff first. You should have been doing that before now anyway. Get on the stick, people.
  
  Come back to this book when you get into Pratchett. I did not say “if.” You will, when you give him a shot. Discworld is a fantasy world on the back of a space turtle. If you can’t get behind that, the problem lies with you.
  
  Topics include gender identity, “Lessons in Headology and Critical Thinking from the Lancre Witch,” “Granny Weatherwax and the Moral Problem of Paternalism,” and “Hogfather and the Existentialism of Kierkegaard.”
  
  This book dives so deep, far more skillfully than I feared. I worried that writers might cut the stuff to shreds to come up with some half-baked ideas about it. Instead, the writers come from a genuine love of Discworld. It’s easy to see. They write the way the best nerds enthuse on their favorite topics. They love talking and dissecting every minute aspect.
  
  
• 
  Ruth Feathers

  Pratchett is one of those authors that grow with rereading. Layers of meaning, jokes that you missed the first time through. This book is an appreciation of those qualities, and more. GNU Terry Pratchett.
• 
  Ann

  Not an easy read but very enjoyable.