I was talking to a friend about philosophy the other day who mentioned the phrase ‘light saber of truth’. This immediately led to a discussion of the parallels between Star Wars and contemporary philosophy, which turned out to be an extremely amusing source of analogies and comparisons between academic and fictional worlds. After spending an amusing half hour or so thinking about which philosophers would best match up with each of the Star Wars characters (Darth Descartes? Ludwig Skywalker? Plato-D2? — the possibilities are endless!) we thought that it would be a good idea if someone came up with a Star Wars spoof comic strip based on the battle between rival philosophies… and thus Philosophy Wars was born!

The idea probably wouldn’t have gone much further, but I had trouble sleeping the following night (too much revision and an annoying cold that just won’t go away!) and so decided to investigate further. After coming up with some more amusing character names, I discovered this amazing little program by Darel Finley called Star Wars TSG that creates Star Wars title sequences, complete with scrolling yellow text and opening credits. I just couldn’t resist coming up with a Philosophy Wars equivalent and proceeded to rewrite the introductions to the original Star Wars trilogy to fit the fictional story that my friend and I had created. It was great fun and you can see the results here in glorious widescreen QuickTime and on YouTube in regular MP4 format.

The choice of the analytic philosophy establishment as the evil Empire seemed an obvious one, not because I’m inherently opposed to it (most of the philosophy I have studied is analytic), but because it was just more fun to have a pop at the predominant philosophical tradition. I’ll leave you to find out who are the major good and bad guys as I had to change some of the names to make them fit the plot and don’t want to spoil any of the jokes, but the story basically comes down to a bunch of rebel philosophers who heroically resist the attempt to turn philosophy into a set of logically derived formulae and thus ‘restore freedom of thought to the galaxy’ (sic). I’d dearly love to go the whole hog and come up with an illustrated comic strip, but I don’t have much time at the moment and so this will probably have to wait for a bit. In the meantime, if anyone out there has the necessary graphics skills or is a dab hand with Lego stop-frame animation then I’d be more than happy to collaborate! (I already have several ideas for additional plot lines…)

Anyway, hope you enjoy watching these clips at least half as much as I enjoyed making them. I’ll be posting subsequent episodes, as well as the inevitable prequels, over the next few weeks so watch this space for future developments (you can also subscribe via iTunes or RSS to make it easy to keep up to date!). Have fun… and may the assertoric force be with you!