The Comedy of Mind

Originally published in 1999, The Comedy of Mind is a philosophical essay on the relationship between philosophy and laughter. Glasgow focuses on characteristic techniques and topics from the realm of comedy such as wonder, folly and madness, paradox, wordplay, unmasking, nothing and nonsense and uses these as a way of examining the limits of human thought and reason as they have come to light in philosophical reflection down the ages. Key players in this account include philosophers...
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Originally published in 1999, The Comedy of Mind is a philosophical essay on the relationship between philosophy and laughter. Glasgow focuses on characteristic techniques and topics from the realm of comedy such as wonder, folly and madness, paradox, wordplay, unmasking, nothing and nonsense and uses these as a way of examining the limits of human thought and reason as they have come to light in philosophical reflection down the ages. Key players in this account include philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, the Cynics and Sophists, Erasmus, Montaigne, Giordano Bruno, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, Robert Nozick and Thomas Nagel, as well as comic masters such as Aristophanes, Cervantes, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Molière, Swift, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde and Joe Orton. In his concern with the limits of human reason, Glasgow also explores various forms of mysticism (Christian, Buddhist, Shamanic and Taoist) and considers questions raised by modern logic and science (Gödel's Theorem, relativity and quantum theory). Informed by an aversion to dogmatism and intellectual arrogance, The Comedy of Mind serves as a reminder of our necessary limitations and blind spots as thinking beings. It brings together comic drama and literature with philosophical texts in a way that sheds new light on comedy and philosophy alike.