Michael Schur is the creator of The Good Place, and in this book he entertainingly summarizes all of the philosophy that he picked up along the way. To sum up: there is no way to be perfect. But there is still good in trying. Schur marches cheerfully through classic philosophical dilemmas, first presenting different philosophers’ takes on them, then pointing out issues with each answer. There are several satisfying callbacks to The Good Place; several cast members also take turns reading some of the quotations from the book, which was lovely to hear. The constant variations on the same theme did get tiresome after a while, but Schur’s narration is smooth and enjoyable, so it wasn’t hard to keep going. Certainly I suspect it was much easier to read this than to try to read the philosophers’ original writings. (Something I found personally amusing: he refers to the “trolley problem” and also brings up the “shopping cart problem“, but here in Australia, shopping carts are referred to as trolleys! So the two problems have the same name.)
Tag: genre-philosophy
The Just City, by Jo Walton
This makes me want to actually read Plato’s Republic. Apollo and Athena decide that they’re going to experimentally create Plato’s hypothetical “just city” by using real people, and they put Platonic philosophers in charge of implementation, which goes about as well as one would expect. I liked the viewpoint characters and the differing life experiences that they brought from their various historical eras, but the novel really takes off when Athena brings in Socrates and under his influence, the residents of the city (mostly children raised, after all, by philosophers) immediately begin questioning everything, including how a city that relies on the purposeful creation of a laboring class can be considered “just”. Such a fun read.