Thomas Cathcart

This book is a fun read with jokes that illustrate the points.

I am not a philosopher. I am not asking the fundamental questions: Whay am I here? Where did I come from? I already have answers to those questions. I don't wonder if everything I see and hear is an illusion. I am not a philosopher. I have moved from such questions to working on what should I do? What should I be?

I remember when I was a youth I read a scholarly article in Scientific American reporting on research that showed that to sand out a scratch, you had to sand as deep as the scratch. I was excited to learn that, because I had been wondering about it. But to my dad, it was obvious that you have to sand as deep as the scratch is to get it out.

When I was working on an MBA. I took a finance class. The second week, the profesor ask: 'What is money?' The class was silent - that hadn't been in the assigned reading. Then he answered his own question: 'We really don't know.' I began thinking: I have children in elementaray school. They all know what money is. And here is this graduate school professor who doesn't know what money is. In elementary school, they have "all about" books that are about 1 cm thick. Titles such as: "All About Fish", "All About Electricity" are at my local library. Then in college we get books like: Introduction to Partial Differential Equations. They only introduce us to partial differential equations, and are 5 cm thick.

The book gets to this point on page 182: "We never hear about hairdressers pondering: 'What is haridressing?' If a hairdresser doesn't know what hairdressing is, he's in the wrong line of work."

I cannot be a philosopher. Long ago I found answers to those questions.
There is no need to be lost and confused - the answers are available. For example: http://www.mormon.org/… (more)

I've been a casual reader of philosophy since my dad gave me a copy of "Thales to Dewey" when I was a senior in high school. I mention this only because I'm not sure if the jokes were funnier to me because I was familiar with most of the philosophical points they were illustrating. Either way, one isn't going to walk away from this book knowing a great deal about philosophy. But it might take the scary/snobby edge off of the subject and allow one to more comfortably take up reading a good philosophy book.… (more)