Review by SFI Research Fellow Anthony Eagan
The cottage industry of compiling philosophical essays about popular cultural artifacts began to grow in the early 2000s, with books like The Simpsons and Philosophy, The Matrix and Philosophy, and Bob Dylan and Philosophy. Yet the origins go back to Benjamin Hoff’s 1982 bestseller The Tao of Pooh, which introduced readers to the more or less unfamiliar Eastern philosophical system of Taoism through A.A. Milne’s familiar tales about anthropomorphic animals. While the appeal of these books is understandable, given that they make difficult philosophical issues more accessible and at the same time reveal greater depths beneath what otherwise might seem to be mere pastimes and entertainments, too many of the now hundreds of such titles feel forced, published for the writer’s sake more so than the reader’s. Do we really need The Atkins Diet and Philosophy, The Red Sox and Philosophy, or Kiss and Philosophy? Some cultural phenomena have nothing to do with the hard problems of human existence and are patently unphilosophical.
This past April, Palgrave McMillan published The Philosophy of Ted Chiang, edited by David Friedell. It is the rare welcome addition to the subgenre, in part because Ted Chiang’s science fiction is profound across many areas of philosophical inquiry — including questions concerning the nature of time, human consciousness, language, identity, and agency. It is made even more welcome by the inclusion of a foreword by Chiang himself, who admits that, while he does not set out to write stories that dramatize specific philosophical questions, he nevertheless turns to philosophy during the process of writing, the better to understand the nature of his own imaginative output. In the process of writing “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom,” for example, Chiang read Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves alongside Robert Kane’s The Significance of Free Will. Meanwhile, the title is a reference to Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety. “I clarified my own thinking about certain philosophical questions, but I can’t say that was my original goal,” Chiang writes, adding that “science fiction needs to be good art, and a certain amount of real science or real philosophy can help with that, but if pursuing absolute accuracy would interfere with the author’s artistic goals, art should take priority.”
Chiang, an SFI Miller Scholar who regularly contributes to meetings with his abundant knowledge of literary history, science, technology, philosophy, and art, is arguably America’s preeminent science-fiction writer. This is another reason Ted Chiang and Philosophy is richer than so many other similarly titled volumes. The scientific foundations of his work allow the essay contributors to speculate not only about the perennial ethical, aesthetic, and epistemological themes his work popularly covers, but also about the problems that science increasingly presents for the philosophically minded: a philosophical outlook on Chiang’s work carries with it a philosophical outlook on science. In essays like “We Can Remember it for You Better: Ted Chiang on Technology and Human Knowledge,” and “Time Machines and Predictors are Possible but Unlikely,” the authors allow us to glimpse how storytelling, technology, scientific conundra, and human identity are all delicately interwoven. Other essays, like “Existential Responsibility in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Chiang,” deal more strictly with questions of morality and the affirmation of individual human selfhood.
A worthwhile volume for devoted fans of Chiang’s work as well as academic philosophers and laypersons in love with deep questions, and a notable exception to the publishing trend of over-philosophizing the non-philosophical, The Philosophy of Ted Chiang does some justice to the wonderful stories of one of our greatest living explorers of the human condition.
Book Details
The Philosophy of Ted Chiang, edited by David Friedell
- Palgrave Macmillan (April 23, 2025)
- 227 pages
- ISBN: 3031816617 (Hardcover)
- $39.99 (Hardcover); $29.99 (PDF)