Monty Python and Philosophy, Gary Hardcastle [portable ebook reader TXT] 📗

including Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion. Edited with an introduction by J.C.A. Gaskin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Having finished that, have a go at J.C.A. Gaskin, Hume’s Philosophy of Religion (London: Macmillan, 1978).

63

Saint Anselm, “The Ontological Argument,” in John Perry and Michael Bratman, eds., Introduction to Philosophy, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 39-40.

64

David Hume, “Of Miracles,” in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), pp. 72-90.

65

Michel Foucault, The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, edited by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York: The New Press, 2003), p. 375.

66

Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, edited by Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1994), p. 8.

67

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 37.

68

Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 93.

69

Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 76.

70

“Hermits,” Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 8, “Full Frontal Nudity.”

71

Simon Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 129.

72

Franz Kafka, “Couriers,” in R.C. Solomon, ed., Existentialism, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 171. Other great works of twentieth-century fiction and drama owe much to Kafka, such as the plays of Samuel Beckett (whose Waiting for Godot is subtitled a “tragicomedy”) or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

73

Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis,” in The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken, 1971), p. 91.

74

Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in Solomon, Existentialism, p. 197.

75

John Cleese et al., Monty Python Speaks! (New York: Avon Books, 1999), p. 249.

76

John Cleese et al., The Pythons: Autobiography by The Pythons (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2003), p. 306.

77

Friedrich Nietzsche, “Daybreak,” in A Nietzsche Reader (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 87.

78

Monty Python Speaks!, ibid., p. 247.

79

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), Chapters 4-6.

80

Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and The Flies (New York: Random House, 1975).

81

The Gay Science (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), p. 344.

82

The Will to Power (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 688.

83

A nice discussion of the development of the show occurs in, G. Perry, Life of Python (London: Pavilion, 1983).

84

Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972), pp. 229-243.

85

Leon R. Kass, Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002), p. 65.

86

Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” in Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon, eds., The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 4-5.

87

I thank George Reisch for his excellent comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and Gary Hardcastle for risking accepting a chapter by an Englishman from Gerrards Cross.

88

Philosophers discover nonsense periodically. David Hume (1711-1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) did so in the eighteenth century. No one has discussed nonsense philosophically with quite the verve of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), however, who devoted a whole chapter of his Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994) to “insignificant speech.”

89

Note the rhetoric of the upper-case letter in this. No one wants to study nothing; but Nothing, well, that is different. As regards Nothing, there turned out to be a great deal to say, none of it, as one might expect, understood to be nonsense by those who said it. For a whole lot of Nothing, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962).

90

These are all, of course, moments in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. For the eel-filled hovercraft, see “The Hungarian Phrasebook Sketch,” Episode 25, “Spam.” Proceed to Episode 7, “You’re No Fun Anymore,” for the blancmanges, and then back to Episode 25 for Karl Marx in the sketch titled “Communist Quiz” (aka “World Forum”). Finally, for the fully grown Minister of Overseas Development see “Mrs. Niggerbaiter Explodes,” in Episode 28, “Mr. and Mrs. Brian Norris’ Ford Popular.”

91

Intertextuality, when viewed as more than plagiarism, can effect a decisive transformation in an image of academic misconduct by which we are possessed, also. This fact has not, however, wholly appeased the editors.

92

Carnap offers this diagnosis in his essay “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,” in A.J. Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism (New York: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 60-81. I use “overcoming” and not “elimination” in the text since it is both a better translation of the original and more expressive of the Carnap’s intent. Some influences on Carnap in this matter are scouted by Gottfried Gabriel in his introduction to Steve Awodey and Carsten Klein, eds., Carnap Brought Home (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), pp. 3-23.

93

One of the few great theorists of humor in the history of philosophy was Kant, who expressed clearly that telling stories in which things that happen to be physically impossible happen (a man’s hair turning white in one night) is simply boring, whereas telling stories in which wildly bizarre things happen (a man’s wig turning white overnight) is often funny. For Kant this was indicative of the need for engagement of the understanding in trying to learn something from the story, an engagement that is frustrated in a unique way in the joke. This is all in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

94

At this point the reader might wish to meditate on the fact that many consider W.V. Quine the greatest analytic philosopher. Moreover, as one of the editors pointed out, when Lenny Bruce started to get serious, he ceased being recognizably a comedian and became a philosopher. I count these as major confirmations of my account.

95

Peter Heath takes up this very example in a genuinely funny essay on ‘Nothing’ in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967).

96

William James, Pragmatism (New York: Meridian Books, 1943), p. 163.

97

James’s sense of humor was observed by Gilbert Ryle, who noted that James “restored to philosophy, what had been missing since Hume, that sense of the ridiculous, which saves one from taking seriously everything that is said solemnly,” in A.J. Ayer et al., The Revolution in Philosophy (London: MacMillan, 1963), p. 9.

98

Bertrand Russell,