Was reading this interesting book called ‘Plato and a Platypus walk into a bar’, written by Daniel Martin Klein. It explains several philosophical concepts with the help of jokes that serve to illustrate the points in the book.
Already halfway through it, and here are some snippets for you:) It’s kind of an easy read, so I would suggest that you grab a copy if you can!
“To the memory of our philosophical grandfather GROUCHO MARX, who summed up our basic ideology when he said,“These are my principles; if you don’t like them, I have others.”
“Does the universe have a purpose?
According to Aristotle, everything has a telos, which is an inner goal it is meant to attain. An acorn has a telos: an oak tree. It’s what an acorn is “meant to be.” Birds have one; bees have one. They say that down in Boston even beans have one. It’s part of the very structure of reality.
If that seems a little abstract, in the following story Mrs. Goldstein telescopes the telos down to earth.
Mrs. Goldstein was walking down the street with her two grandchildren. A friend stopped to ask her how old they were.
She replied, “The doctor is five and the lawyer is seven.”
“When asked whether he believed in free will, twentieth-century novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer replied, tongue-in-cheek, “I have no choice.”
“Ted meets his friend Al and exclaims, “Al! I heard you died!”
“Hardly,” says Al, laughing. “As you can see, I’m very much alive.”
“Impossible,” says Ted. “The man who told me is much more reliable than you.”
A man stumbles into a deep well and plummets a hundred feet before grasping a spindly root, stopping his fall. His grip grows weaker and weaker, and in his desperation he cries out, “Is there anybody up there?”
He looks up, and all he can see is a circle of sky. Suddenly, the clouds part and a beam of bright light shines down on him. A deep voice thunders, “I, the Lord, am here. Let go of the root, and I will save you.”
The man thinks for a moment and then yells, “Is there anybody else up there?