Everything I Know I Learned From TV

Jul 7, 2024 1:50 PM

Author:Mark Rowlands

Everything I Know I Learned From TV uses characters we all know and love and their TV worlds to explain the great questions of philosophy. The only qualifications you need to join in are ownership of a sofa, a remote control, a sense of humour and an enquiring mind. The philosophy discussed is very much 'life' philosophy, answering the questions we all want to know: How do you define what is a good life to lead? The Simpsons disagree over the right way to live with Nietzsche and Diogenes on hand to take sides. What is real happiness? Aristotle fights Descartes for the heart and mind of Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw. Can a good person do a bad thing? Kant and Socrates pay a call on Tony Soprano and his latter-day Mob to talk moral philosophy. Where does love end and friendship begin? Rachel and Ross ask Plato about the philosophy of emotions and wonder if they're just good friends. Is the pursuit of self-knowledge a good thing? Socrates helps Niles and Frasier Crane and their dad deal with the relative merit of the examined and the unexamined life. And much more.

Reviews

Its rigour and lucidity, the persuasive, easy way that philosophical dilemmas are attached to everyday life, Everything I Know I Learned From TV stands far above most previous efforts to popularise philosophy

—— Independent

The author's delivery may be jokey, but his philosophy is the real thing

—— You Magazine, Mail on Sunday

The indiest book of all time

—— Guardian

Brilliant depictions of the era...nails it so precisely

—— Stuart Evers , The Word

With The Alternative Hero, Tim Thornton has gone through the looking glass of obsessive fandom and brought back a hilarious, memorable, and hard-rocking tale

—— Madison Smartt Bell, author of 'All Souls' Rising'

A deliciously bittersweet novel that will touch the heart of anybody who ever fell in love with rock and roll

—— Mick Brown, author of 'Tearing Down the Wall of Sound'

Sparkly and authentic

—— Mark Hodkinson , The Times

It's the usual lad-lit comic romp ... but it's fresher, funnier and more amiable than most

—— Brandon Robshaw , Independent on Sunday

No one can make you feel quite like Stephen Fry can . . . Funny and tormentedly frank

—— Time Out

Hugely enjoyable . . . compulsively readable . . . Fry is excellent on the details of memory, too, and always able to embellish them with effortless erudition . . . this engaging, engrossing read is as honest a portrait of a young liar as one could hope to read

—— Scotsman

He is bubbly, funny and charming, and he gives his fans plenty of material if they want to speculate on why he is both so gifted and so wayward

—— The Times

The jokes . . . transcend the complexes of the joker, turning the Stephenesque into a national as well as a family treasure

—— Guardian

Not so much an autobiography, more a way of life; discursive, funny, sometimes almost unbelievably sad, opinionated, nostalgic and very infectious

—— Claire Rayner, New Statesman

Fry can be funny about anything

—— Good Book Guide

So charming and so acute that one cannot help forgiving him

—— Daily Express

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