Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul

John Wiley & Sons, 2008 (edited with Robert Arp)

PART ONE DOES THE DARK KNIGHT ALWAYS DO RIGHT?

PART TWO LAW, JUSTICE, AND THE SOCIAL ORDER: WHERE DOES BATMAN FIT IN?

4 No Man’s Land: Social Order in Gotham City
and New Orleans (Brett Chandler Patterson)
5 Governing Gotham (Tony Spanakos)
6 The Joker’s Wild: Can We Hold the Clown Prince Morally Responsible? (Christopher Robichaud)

PART THREE ORIGINS AND ETHICS: BECOMING THE CAPED CRUSADER

7 Batman’s Promise (Randall M. Jensen)
8 Should Bruce Wayne Have Become Batman? (Mahesh Ananth and Ben Dixon)
9 What Would Batman Do? Bruce Wayne as Moral Exemplar (Ryan Indy Rhodes and David Kyle Johnson)

PART FOUR WHO IS THE BATMAN? (IS THAT A TRICK QUESTION?)

10 Under the Mask: How Any Person Can Become Batman (Sarah K. Donovan and Nicholas P. Richardson)
11 Could Batman Have Been the Joker? (Sam Cowling and Chris Ragg)
12 Batman’s Identity Crisis and Wittgenstein’s Family Resemblance (Jason Southworth)
13 What Is It Like to Be a Batman? (Ron Novy)

PART FIVE BEING THE BAT: INSIGHTS FROM EXISTENTIALISM AND TAOISM

14 Alfred, the Dark Knight of Faith: Batman and Kierkegaard (Christopher M. Drohan)
15 Dark Nights and the Call of Conscience (Jason J. Howard)
16 Batman’s Confrontation with Death, Angst, and Freedom (David M. Hart)

PART SIX FRIEND, FATHER, … RIVAL? THE MANY ROLES OF THE BAT

17 Why Batman Is Better Than Superman (Galen Foresman)
18 World’s Finest … Friends? Batman, Superman, and the Nature of Friendship (Daniel P. Malloy)
19 Leaving the Shadow of the Bat: Aristotle, Kant, and Dick Grayson on Moral Education (Carsten Fogh Nielsen)
20 The Tao of the Bat (Bat-Tzu)

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MEDIA

“Should Batman Kill the Joker?“, op-ed by Mark D. White and Robert Arp, The Boston Globe, July 25, 2008, subsequently reprinted by several newspapers and included in the eighth edition of The Norton Sampler: Short Essays for Composition, edited by Thomas Cooley (W.W. Norton & Co., 2013)
“What Batman Can Teach Us About Philosophy,” Q&A with White and Arp by Peter Bebergal, The Boston Globe, July 13, 2008
Review in Publishers Weekly, June 2, 2008.
Review in The Sydney Morning Herald, August 25, 2008.
Review in Library Journal, August 15, 2008, pp. 87-88.
Review in Screen Education, Autumn 2009, pp. 157-158.
Ron Novy’s chapter “What Is It Like to Be a Batman?” excerpted in The Philosophers’ Magazine, issue 44, 1st quarter 2009, pp. 97-100.
Psychjourney podcast with Mark D. White (apparently no longer available).
Mark D. White’s chapter “Why Doesn’t Batman Kill the Joker?” reprinted in Superheroes: The Best of Philosophy and Pop Culture, edited by William Irwin (Wiley e-book, 2011).
Mark D. White’s chapters “Why Doesn’t Batman Kill the Joker?” and “The Tao of the Bat” were reprinted in Introducing Philosophy Through Pop Culture: From Socrates to South Park, from Hume to House, edited by William Irwin and David Kyle Johnson (Blackwell-Wiley, 2010).

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