I think therefore I laugh: the flip side of philosophy

by John Allen Paulos

The preeminent explicator of mathematical logic to non-mathematicians, John Allen Paulos is familiar to general readers not only from his bestselling books but also from his media appearances, including The David Letterman Show and National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" and "Science Friday," as well as articles in Newsweek, Nature, Discover, Business Week, the New York Times Book Review, The Nation, New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books. Paulos originally wrote this charming little book on analytic logic, its mathematics, and its puzzles in 1985. And as in his later books, he uses jokes, stories, parables, and anecdotes to elucidate difficult concepts, in this case, some of the fundamental problems in modern philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy, Humor, Nonfiction, Science, Psychology, Mathematics, Logic

176 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A look at philosophy, logic and science that touches almost every important topic in those areas that you can imagine (Bell inequalities, Arrow's theorem, self-reference, Newcombe's paradox...). I absolutely loved the proof of the Gödel's Theorem using ideas from Kolmogorov complexity; it really sheds light on the topic, showing that you can think in incompleteness as a limit of the complexity of arithmetic, something that affects to both humans and machines.

I have learnt a lot. It's a short book but you have to read it slowly because the density of ideas is huge. The explanations are very good. And, of course, at some moments it's quite funny.

[Kefi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading 'I Think, Therefore I Laugh'. Most sections were more enjoyable than others (due to my level of understanding in regard to those sections) - and I had a hard time laughing when reading the sections I didn't understand. I enjoy reading books on logic, so naturally that was my favourite section. On the whole it was a good book. I would recommend it to those who are familiar with philosophy on an intermediate level.

[Koen Crolla · Rating 1 out of 5]

Paulos is normally one of my favourite writers, so it was really shocking how bad this one was. A lot of it read like a very half-assed attempt at reproducing Gödel, Escher, Bach ;† it's mostly shallow word games built around (hopefully) deliberate confusion between natural language and more precise logical language. Paulos seems to have a much worse logical intuition than I would have expected from a mathematician, and he definitely has a very shaky grasp on language. It's not even worth reading for the jokes: none of them are original, and most are older than Paulos himself. (If you, for whatever reason, still like Groucho Marx and Leo Rosten, you might enjoy seeing some of their greatest hits reprinted, I guess.)
I normally reserve one-star ratings for books that are actively trying to make the world a worse place, but while ITTIL definitely has a few surprising moments,‡ in this case I have to award it entirely for wasting my time so comprehensively.

At least it confirmed my understanding that the only people who think highly of philosophers are people who are very, very bad at philosophy.

--------

† Add Paulos to the list of writers who don't understand the Epimenides paradox.

‡ E.g. p. 94:

If the story of the Mulla and the Roman seems too farfetched, imagine a modern physicist trying to explain to an Australian aborigine that neutrinos have no mass, or something about the properties of quarks and black holes.

[Kyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I was a kid and people talked about meaningful, interesting things, I always piped in with the same beguiling question: "How do jokes spread?" It seems like a fascinating evolution and tastemaking process—after all, the teller of a joke has to remember why he/she found it funny, deem it funny enough to pass on, and then do so, in turn impressing their audience and convincing them to do the same. Furthermore, somebody had to be the first person to say "A priest, a rabbi, and a monk walk into a bar..."—think about that for a moment—and then, in the truest oral tradition, it became ubiquitous.

Trying to answer this question led me to fields of joke theory and the books of John Allen Paulos, a sort-of superstar mathematician who collects a number of his ideas/essays/lectures in this book. It really has nothing to do with the paragraph above that I described—Paulos is more interested in the intersection of humor and philosophy—and despite its constant logic games, I found several fascinating anecdotes and stories within. None of which I can remember now.

[Remo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delicioso librito (valga la relamida expresión) en el que el autor corre sobre una serie de paradojas lógicas, acertijos, chistes y demás miscelánea filosófica. No he conseguido desentrañar la estructura que sigue el autor en la exposición del tema; más bien parece que ha sacado del armario lo primero que ha visto, lo más llamativo. Aun así, el texto es altamente adictivo y tuve la sensación de transportarme a otro sitio mientras lo leía (en perfecto estado de sobriedad, por cierto). Muy entretenido, y con un peculiar sentido del humor.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting, but badly written. The whole thing felt like I was reading the transcript of philosophy teachers thoughts. He would just mention things without any hint to what they meant. In short it's not a good book to read if you want to learn anything about philosophy...or humour for that matter. The groucho marx 'hypothetical conversations' made me want to vomit myself into a coma.

[Julio Pino · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Comedy is the attempt by the human mind to break through the fetters of language".---Jacques Lacan
When I sat down with the boys for chow at the house of corrections I told them the following joke: Ms. Dorothy Parker was once asked to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence, and she said, "you can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think". (Uproarious laughter all around from the O.G.s) Ludwig Wittgenstein once said an entire work of philosophy could be constructed from a string of jokes, and John Allen Paulos has taken up his challenge. This is the Wittgenstein of the PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS. By intentionally confusing and conflating horticulture with whore-to-culture Ms. Parker made a valid philosophical point: are we talking about gardening or prostitution? Which language game are you playing at the moment? Ludwig, perhaps recalling his Hebrew ancestors, loved to tell this knee-slapper: "A Jew in Russia living in the Pale has only one job, and that is to watch for the coming of the Messiah. When asked how he likes his work he replies, "the salary is low, but job security is excellent". A joke that elucidates philosophy cannot rely solely on wordplay, puns, or sarcasm (If you want that, go read Pynchon or Nabokov). Some hidden truth, or preferably several, must lie behind the humor, otherwise, you wind up with what Ms. Parker called "calisthenics with words". There's a great Freudian joke, courtesy of philosopher Groucho Marx. Lady Guest on YOU BET YOUR LIFE: Groucho, I have 11 children. Groucho: 11 Kids, that must be a great responsibility. Lady Guest: Well, I really love my husband. Groucho: Lady, I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while! And you thought philosophy was dry and stale. Everything in the world is part of a language game, everything is a joke waiting to be born, and even the TRACTATUS can be read as one comic poem.

[John Michael Strubhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating and truly humorous book. If you think that mathematics and philosophy can tell you nothing about humor, you're just wrong and to correct your faulty view, you need to read this. Hey, I was skeptical that I could learn something about humor through mathematical and philosophical principles, but I was wrong, so I corrected my faulty thinking and now, I'm better informed and thoroughly amused. Let this anecdotal "evidence" be a factor in changing your prior beliefs regarding my truth claim and thus provide you with a reliable basis on which to perform a Bayesian analysis of the truth claim. In the end, you will laugh.

[Mala Ashok · Rating 4 out of 5]

I generally go about saying, "I am therefore I think", with apologies to Rene Descartes. Now I think I'll quote John Allan Paulos and say "I think therefore I laugh."Paulos has captured difficult ideas as memorable jokes. You don't need to be a Philosopher or a Mathematician to understand this book - though it would help. I find fun in absurdities and logical conundrums and these were well represented in the book. I would recommend the book to students of Mathematical logic and to members of the public who want to understand logic.

[Jim Razinha · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wondered why all the unlove...and then I read this. Scattershot with some order...

Way too much formal logic, too little humor, good statistics examples (humans as a rule suck at probability). Oh, well, can't knock it out every time.

[Enrique · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a quick and thoroughly complete introduction to logic, with good jokes to illustrate the points. Not the best introduction off course, is too short to be the best, only that is complete and have good jokes.

[David Harris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have enjoyed several of John Allen Paulos’s his other books. This one is a little too cerebral for my taste. Or something. I'm not sure exactly what. In any case, I'm going to set it aside for the moment and perhaps revisit it sometime in the future.

[ND Ratna · Rating 2 out of 5]

mohon maaf sekali aku tidak bisa memahami penjelasannya. apalagi dengan menggabungkan silogisme, aritmatika, AI dan filosofi.
selain itu menurutku tidak banyak lucu dari percakapan yg dibangun. ada sih yg lucu tapi paling cmn 1 or 2.

[Fabian Ruiz · Rating 3 out of 5]

My head hurts now

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed his other, later, books so much better. Not sure I would have read more had I started with this one.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t think I ever found anything laugh out loud funny here, but that’s not to say that it wasn’t funny. Clear, interesting, and genuinely entertaining.

[Dejan Basic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful little book

[Δx Δp ≥ ½ ħ · Rating 5 out of 5]

hehe.. humor konyol yang "berat" dan filososfis. membuat Anda berpikir bahwa tertawa ngakak dan menggaruk kepala adalah setali tiga uang.

sekilas seperti buku2 humornya Nashruddin Hoja atau humor sufi gituh, tapi lebih inetens

yang paling diinget pas bagian kutipan Robert Benchley. dia konon pernah berkata, " Bisa dikatakan ada dua kelompok manusia di bumi ini: mereka yang membagi manusia di bumi ini menjadi dua kelompok dan mereka yang tidak mem­bagi." :)) *catatan: terjemahan bebas*

[Bob Collins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interest proposition, "a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would be written that would consists entirely of jokes." Ludwig Wittgenstein.

More than just a collection of jokes, this book shows how the philosophy of jokes actually works. Difficult read, but worth while.

[Brenda Deflem · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wittgenstein often got depressed while philosophically analysing our language, . I can understand why. Not the kind of book you read next to the swimming pool but great to exercise certain parts of your brain you usually don't activate quit often enough :-)

[an infinite number of monkeys · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't laugh. Therefore, I didn't think. So it's not the fault of the book or its author. Clever.

[GONZA · Rating 2 out of 5]

per la mia mente limitata decisamente ostico in alcuni punti, in altri fa addirittura ridere, ma il titolo trae in inganno perchè c'è veramente poco da ridere, oppure, io non ho capito ;)

[Melis Barin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this not-so-meaningful book hoping to find a homorous approach to philosophy, but no, it's not a good choice for this purpose. It was a waste of time.

[Olli Helttula · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting subject matter but the style of presentation really turned me off.

[Mills College Library]

190.207 P331 2000

[Zara Pirata · Rating 4 out of 5]

it's been in my house since I was a baby, read it several years ago and loved it. I read it from time to time, love it

[Yates Buckley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book in parts, but inconsistent quality and flow... This is a trip across a mix of fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of knowledge of different kinds. Excerpts from well-known stories, parables, paradoxes and jokes accompany the text to provide concrete examples behind the philosophy. But while the examples and theories are interesting, there is sometimes a difficult connection between the two and neither side is as clear as it could be. Nevertheless the parts that are good are good enough to make up for the overall choppy flow.

[Rulfhi Alimudin Pratama · Rating 3 out of 5]

Layaknya sedang membaca kalkulus. John Allen menjabarakan kasus demi kasus dengan memakai variabel. Saya pikir penulis buku ini cukup keki dengan beberapa filsuf, sebut saja Groucho atau ia sedang membuat anti tesis. Entahlah. Dan memang untuk jadi filsuf harus menguasai dulu matematika