However silly one may think the movies are, however pedantic one may find the books about them, however unworthy of academic study either of these may be, it is undeniable that there is a lot of content to chew through. It is a difficult task and James Bond and Philosophy does an admirable job attempting it. The book does, sadly, fall short on several occasions of having an acceptable level of proficiency with the material. Despite this grievous problem, more often than not the book does make salient points regarding James Bond and approaches the wondrous world of 007 from a fascinating set of angles.

Edited by James B. South and Jacob M. Held, this is part of the Popular Culture and Philosophy series by the publisher Open Court. This volume is divided into five sections of varying themes with two to four essays per section.  The topics covered are: Bond, Existentialism, and Death; The Man Behind the Number; Bond, Politics, and Law; Knowledge and Technology; and Multiculturalism, Women, and a More Sensitive Bond. All in all, it’s a pretty broad range of topics, and the essays deal with both the films and novels. 

Though I cannot speak to whether the philosophic ideas and theories attributed to various people throughout history are accurate in all the pieces in the work, I can state that, on multiple occasions, the facts surrounding James Bond are not quite as spot-on as one might hope. As a primary example, the second piece in the book, “How to Live (and How to Die)", by Mahlete-Tsigé Getachew, contains an egregious error.  It is impossible to determine whether this error is intended or simply the result of sloppy research. On page 27, the writer enters into  discussion of how “M alludes to his agents as numbers. James Bond is always ‘007’ and never ‘Bond.'”  Getachew then goes on to quote M in Goldeneye, “‘If you think for one moment I don’t have the balls to send a man to his death, you’re wrong… I don’t have any compunction about sending him to die.’”

It’s a good quote and absolutely helps prove Getachew’s points. The problem is that in the scene she quotes, M refers to James Bond as “Bond” not once, but twice.  I cannot fathom what Getachew was thinking.  Did she not watch the movie?  Did she not even watch the whole scene in question? Perhaps she found the quote written up somewhere else and never bothered to actually see what it is that she was writing about. 

Whatever the case may be, James Bond is referred to as “Bond” by M on multiple occasions, making the initial assertion a nonsensical one.  The error might be forgivable if Getachew’s point was that in this movie, or in this sort of talk between M and Bond, he was always a number and never a person. That simply isn’t the case though. The fact that Bond is referred to as such by M twice in this scene calls the validity of Getachew’s entire piece into question.  And, beyond that, one would have thought that the editors of the book would have engaged in a modicum of fact-checking and caught this incredibly egregious mistake.