The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten
Revision as of 15:03, 27 December 2018 by TheAlmightyGuru (talk | contribs)
The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: 100 Experiments For the Armchair Philosopher is a philosophy book by Julian Baggini published on 2005-07-07. It explores various philosophical thought experiments by framing them as short stories. The title comes from a scene in Douglas Adams's book, The Restaurant At the End of the Universe where, in order to make eating meat seem less immoral, people bred an animal to become sentient and actually want to be eaten.
Status
I own a paperback copy of this book and have read it.
Review
Good
- Overall, I enjoyed this book.
- The book does a good job at getting across several very interesting thought experiments. Not all of them were that thought-provoking, but several of them were really interesting and worth it for the rest of the book.
- The framing method of telling each problem in a story is a nice way to make the problems seem more real-life, rather than the typical mental masturbation of philosophy.
Bad
- A lot of the thought experiments seem old-fashioned and can be answered fairly definitively thanks to the advancements of science. Zeno's paradox, for example.
- Several of the thought experiments do a pretty poor job in explaining the actual problem. No doubt Baggini couldn't explain them very well in only a couple hundred words, but it seemed like he could have made a better effort on several of the more abstract problems.
Ugly
- Nothing.
