FEATURE CHRIS MADDEN
PCO Artist of the Month for February 2008 was Lee Healey. Cartoonist & illustrator Lee Healey, is a freelancer with over 17 years experience. Lee’s art has appeared in many magazines and comics, including Viz, Maxim, and The Dandy. Other clients have included the CBBC channel, Roy Chubby Brown,and video artist Mark Leckey. Lee prides himself on his versatility, and is able to turn his hand from simple cartoons to cartoon, comic or strip illustrations. Like many modern cartoonists, Lee completes, and delivers, his work digitally. Matt Buck, Bloghorn Ed
It’s the thought that counts
Chris Madden, Cartoonist for Philosophy Now Magazine, gets gobbledegooky. “What is philosophy?” That’s exactly the sort of question that a philosopher would ask. Because, for a philosopher, before you can talk about a subject, you have to know what you’re talking about. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, which is a book that you’d think would supply the answer to this question, says that most definitions of philosophy are ‘controversial’. Other standard works on the subject use expressions that state that there’s ‘no straightforward definition’ or that defining it is ‘notoriously difficult’. This is exactly the sort of answer that philosophers want, of course. The great thing about philosophy is that you need never reach conclusions (or indeed must never reach conclusions) about anything - not even about what the subject is in the first place. As a result, when discussing philosophy you’ll never run out of things to talk about, or if you happen to be a professional philosopher you’ll never be out of a job. I once bought a book called ‘The Meaning of Meaning’, mainly because I liked the title. A big mistake. The first half was nothing but an attempt to pin down the definitions of the words that were going to be used in the second half. Needless to say, I never got as far as the second half, so I still don’t know what the meaning of meaning is. Although I now know the meaning of gobbledegook. It’s generally agreed that philosophy is the study of things by the use of rational thinking. WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG
This is interesting, because a quick glance at a list of the world’s most significant philosophers will reveal that they are amongst the most irrational people on the planet. Take Ludwig Wittgenstein. As well as being one of the major philosophers of the twentieth century he also fancied himself as a bit of an architect, and he designed his own house (a task that was encouraged by his family so that he spent less time philosophising). When the house was nearly finished he discovered that the ceilings were lower than he’d wanted, so he had them raised. Three centimetres. Obsessive? Retentive? (At the same time he failed to notice that he’d put the staircase right in front of the hall window, blocking both the light and the view.) The ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes is reputed to have approached the subject of accommodation somewhat differently, and rather than building a house of idiosyncratic design in the manner of Wittgenstein chose to live in a barrel instead (This barrel story is sometimes reported to be a ludicrous myth, as he is much more likely to have lived in a much grander, altogether more spacious clay pot). As you can see, people who are of a philosophical bent can be somewhat eccentric. Indeed, a major problem that plagues the whole subject of philosophy is that it’s studied by people who are interested in philosophy. Ask a philosopher what the purpose of life is and you may get an answer along the lines of: To understand the essential
truths underlying the phenomenological universe. (It has to include at least one word that you can’t pronounce or spell.) This is very much the sort of conclusion reached by Socrates, possibly the most famous philosopher before Alain de Botton. He’s reputed to have said “The unconsidered life is not worth living.” But then, Socrates was a pompous bombast who was so pig headed that the authorities in ancient Athens asked him to poison himself with hemlock, just to get him out of their hair. And he was so pig headed that he did it. Ask a non-philosopher what the purpose of life is and you may get a totally different sort of answer: To enjoy myself as much as possible without inflicting irreparable damage on my health. Which to choose? It’s a tricky call. What do you think? (As with all things philosophical, end on a question.) THE FOGHORN 4