Introduction: Why So Serious? On Philosophy and Comedy 1. Plato and the Spectacle of Laughter 2. Homage to Penia: Aristophanes’ Plutus as Philosophical Comedy 3. Prostrating Before Adrasteia: Comedy, Philosophy and ‘One’s Own’ in Republic V 4. At Least They Had an Ethos: Comedy as the Only Possible Critique 5. Absolute Knowing: Consternation and Preservation in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida 6. Something Mechanical Encrusted on the Living or, "Que Signifie le Rire?" 7. Humor, Law, and Jurisprudence: On Deleuze’s Political Philosophy 8. Go Bleep Yourself: Why Censorship is Funny 9. Quantum Andy: Andy Kaufman and the Postmodern Turn in Comedy 10. Being Funny: Ontology is a Queer Subject (or, Tractatus Cucumber Saladicus) (a Zen Maoist Koan)
Biography
Russell Ford is Donald W. & Betty J. Buik Chair and Professor of Philosophy at Elmhurst College, USA. He received his PhD from Penn State University in Philosophy and in Literary Theory, Criticism, and Aesthetics. In addition to his work on the relations between philosophy and comedy he is also completing a manuscript on the early work of Gilles Deleuze tentatively titled Between Immanence and Transcendence.
