Most books on philosophy are a bore because a) unlike art, which is ideas in motion, philosophy is merely ideas (no matter how wonderful or complex they may be), and b) most philosophers (who claim that title in primacy) are simply bad writers — the two most notable exceptions to that rule being Plato and Friedrich Nietszche.

And one of the main reasons why most philosophers are bad writers is that they eschew the notion that good writing (or good art, for that matter) has to entertain, as well as enlighten. Often the medicine must be put into a sugar lump, or, the exact opposite way the modern publishing industry, and Hollywood studios, work.

A notable exception to this comes in the form of a 2003 book by philosopher Mark Rowlands, called The Philosopher At The End Of The Universe: Philosophy Explained Through Science Fiction Films, which takes its name from the Douglas Adams book, The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, part of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

The book takes the novel approach of explaining some of the basic ‘big’ problems of philosophy via some of Hollywood’s biggest sci fi smashes. While Rowlands admits, early on, that he is no great wordsmith, in the sense of being able to craft prose that poesizes itself into the nooks and crannies of mind and soul (thus I will not be quoting from it, as I would merely be recapitulating the same things available in the Modern Library’s European Philosophers From Descartes To Nietszche), his book is well written in the most prosaic sense. It is concise, cogent, and witty. There is precious little waste in the small book’s 258 pages (excluding a glossary of handy philosophic terminology).

While I would have liked to have seen the inclusion of such sci fi classics as Star Trek, The Planet Of The Apes, Solaris, Forbidden Planet, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, for all of those films and series raise serious philosophic queries, none of them has an overarching theme the way some of the films Rowlands describes (decidedly lesser films, but better didactic examples of simply laid out problems) do, for they are necessarily more complex and multifarious, as well as being more grounded in purely scientific (or sociological), rather than just philosophic, conundra.