Imagination and Meaning in Calvin and Hobbes by Jamey Heit

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is definitely not Calvin and Hobbes the comic strip. This is a very dense and very academic work of philosophical analysis of a comic strip. Definitely not for the feint of heart. Jamey Heit does a very interesting and freewheeling analys si of the meaning and structure of the humor behind Calvin and Hobbes, one of the more cerebral and delightful comic strips in recent years.

The analysis gets very complicated very quickly, Jacque Derrida gets mentioned in the second page of the first essay. So this is not for the casual fan, this is for the fan of the strip that also has a good grounding in modern philosophy.

It is very interesting and very very intellectually stimulating, but I can see where people who bought the book for some lighthearted reading about their favorite strip can get turned off.



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People have been misappropriating and misinterpreting Occam's razor for a long time.  And the version of Occam's razor most often cited is problematic as it stands alone.  In this essay, Kai Krause puts the razor and what he calls Einstein's Blade in very nice tension and synthesis.

http://www.edge.org/response-detail/11007