Saturday, February 27, 2010

Philosophical Comics

People who get to know me in person occasionally express shock or surprise when they learn about my occasionally lowbrow taste in pop culture, since I like cartoons , bad movies ,and all sorts of comics. I'm not entirely sure why this should be so. In my less charitable moods I'm tempted to think it's because some people use movies etc. as their primary source of intellectual stimulation, and so are snobby about the trash, whereas for me they are for amusement and relaxation, and I get my thinking material, er, elsewhere. I'm much more careful when choosing novels, since they're generally much more of a time commitment, though even here I do enjoy occasional light reading. I will admit, however, to being very picky indeed about music and poetry.

Anyway, it's always a delight when my lowbrow tastes overlap with my highbrow ones, to the confusion of phrenologists everywhere, and I was very excited to find out about Logicomix: An Epic Search For Truth, a fascinating and skillful comic book about the life of Bertrand Russell, and the quest for the foundations of logic and mathematics by Frege, Cantor, Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Gödel, and the rest. The art is good, the storytelling is good, the philosophy is all silly modernism but well portrayed and fascinating. I rate it five out of five formalities.

2 comments:

Henry Karlson said...

Ever look into the Action Philosophers series? I saw one volume and only briefly looked in it and thought, might be good, but didn't have the time or money to investigate.

Michael Sullivan said...

Henry,

I'm not familiar with Action Philosophers. If I see it I'll check it out, though.