Glasgow University offers a Simpsons philosophy class – and it makes perfect sense

News that Glasgow University has launched a one-day course named D’oh! The Simpsons Introduce Philosophy should not even raise an eyebrow. For nearly two decades, intellectuals and philosophers have been praising Matt Groening’s brilliant creation. As philosophy tutor John Donaldson, who will teach the new course, explains it, the show is “full of philosophical themes”.

A scepticism persists that those who claim to see philosophical depth in The Simpsons are simply betraying our shallowness or having a laugh. But far from there being anything paradoxical about a cartoon having philosophical substance, cartoons are actually the ideal artistic vehicle for philosophy.

We use the phrase “cartoon cutout” to describe characters who lack the rich individuality of well-rounded literary creations. That apparent weakness is precisely what makes the residents of Springfield perfect for philosophy. Philosophy deals with the real world but at a level of generality and abstraction, aspiring to the universal rather than the particular. In that sense, philosophy always describes a kind of cartoon world.

Take, for example, the classic episode Homer Badman, where the eponymous klutz ends up being accused of sexual harassment after clumsily snatching a gummy bear stuck to a woman’s jeans. This provides an opportunity to expose the absurdities of extreme forms of standpoint theory, which claims that the socially oppressed can access knowledge unavailable to the socially privileged. There is clearly a lot to this theory, but it goes wrong when it lazily assumes what the philosopher Bertrand Russell called “the superior virtue of the oppressed”.

An over-confident conviction of their own rightness makes the feminists in Homer Badman only see the incident from the standpoint of the self-professed “victim”, and that blinds them to the real truth. The genius of the setup is that they are thus shown to be subject to the same kind of perspectival bias they identified in the patriarchal system they oppose.

This is doing real philosophy, and we even have fancy words to describe the argumentative moves the plot dramatises. Tu quoque is an argument that shows the critic’s argument has the same flaw as the one argued against, while reductio ad absurdum is the method of showing a position to be wrong by taking it to its absurd but logical conclusion.

The Simpsons can do this kind of thing where other narrative arts such as literary fiction and cinema can’t, because a cartoon can focus on the structure of the scenario and the broad types of people involved. Art forms such as literary fiction have to deal with the rich lives of the characters with all their specificity and so can’t achieve the distancing required to do this.

High art is good at showing that, as individuals, our lives are tragic, but not that, as a species, we are pathetically comic. Nothing can beat The Simpsons for portraying the absurdity of the human condition, and helping us to accept it by laughing at ourselves.