Twilight and Philosophy: Vampires, Vegetarians, and the Pursuit of Immortality (The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series) [Paperback]

Most people, presumably, come to titles like this as fans of the featured popular culture phenomenon (here Twilight) with, at best, a passing interest in philosophy. I should say right up that I'm the other way round. I'm a professional philosopher and I've never read or watched Twilight, though I do have some interest in vampires (as in Stoker's Dracula (Penguin Classics) or Vampire: The Masquerade (World of Darkness)) and have previously written in another 'popular philosophy' title (Soccer and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy)). I thus came to this title with an interest in what philosophy could be discerned from the Twilight franchise.

Unsurprisingly, given that this volume collects essays from many different writers, the results were mixed. The first chapter, by George A. Dunn, wasn't that promising. He uses Edward's appetite for Bella to inform the reader about the Platonic conception of Eros (erotic love). It's informative and, as a philosopher without great knowledge of Plato, I found it interesting, but I don't think it will be of so much appeal to those more interested in Twilight than philosophy - it seems like it just uses Edward and Bella as a pretext to talk about things that have nothing to do with Twilight.

Thankfully, the second chapter - on the ethics of vegetarianism, by Jean Kazez - is a real eye-opener. As vampires, the Cullens - unlike humans - need to feast on animals to stay alive. Plausibly this excuses them preying on animals, but crucially it doesn't justify their killing, if that isn't strictly necessary. If they have the willpower, vampires could feed only a little and leave their victim to live. Thus, Kazez argues, their killing of animals cannot be justified as necessary for survival but is a morally dubious lifestyle choice. This, for me, was the best essay of the bunch and makes me want to investigate her recent book, Animalkind: What We Owe to Animals (Blackwell Public Philosophy Series).

I won't continue to go through the rest of the chapters in turn, but a few observations are in order. A substantial section of the book is given over to feminist interpretations of the Twilight stories. While these seemed to raise valid issues, I found them light on philosophy. One author (Bonnie Mann, ch. 10) drew reasonably enough on the work of Simone de Beauvoir, but others focused on discussions of Jane Eyre and Sarah Palin. The same criticism could also be directed at Marc E. Shaw's examination of Meyer's Mormonism (ch. 17). These contributions would no doubt be quite at home in a volume of literary or social studies of Twilight, but seemed to me mis-labelled as philosophical - not that I suppose that will necessarily disappoint those whose real interest is in Twilight instead of philosophy anyway.

On the other hand, there are a couple more essays that simply use Twilight as an excuse to lecture the reader on the author's favoured area of philosophy. I felt Dennis Knepp (semiotics, ch. 15) and Philip Puszczalowski (ontology, ch. 16) particularly guilty, though their interests are perhaps harder to relate to a popular audience (and were at least informative). In fairness, I should point out some of the more successful essays, which for me at least included Nicolas Michaud on personhood (ch. 3), Peter and Eli Fosl on the problem of evil (ch. 5), Brendan Shea on the perils of immortality (ch. 6), and Eric Silverman on the morality of mind-reading (ch. 7). (Perhaps it's no coincidence that I generally found the quality to deteriorate as I read; presumably it was an editorial choice to put what they regarded as the more engaging pieces nearer the front - even if I disagreed with their choice of 'lead'.)

Overall, it's rather hard to say what the average Twilight fan will make of this, while as an introduction to philosophy it certainly falls short of something like Blackburn's Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy or Nagel's What Does it All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy. Nonetheless, even I learned something about philosophy (as well as Twilight) from it and a handful of essays convincingly connect the authors' interests in the two. Even though I felt that several chapters were either too philosophical or too devoid of philosophical content, anything that encourages wider public interest in philosophical questions has at least some merit.

This book was a real eye-opener. So I have read all the Twilight books and even her 'adult' fiction of "The Host". I expected something along the lines of a Buffy book I had read years ago, which was a fairly lighthearted look at the philosophy expressed by various characters. This book is anything but lighthearted!

If you are serious about your philosophy, as in understanding from Greek philosophers onwards, then you will enjoy this book. It gives the chance to view some of the themes in an excellent series of modern literature, but from a fairly serious academic perspective.

I have lent this book to a teenage friend of my son's, who is also a huge Twilight fan, just to see what she makes of it. The only reason for giving this book four stars is that it is not for the fainthearted.

First off, I did buy this as a Twilight fan with a bit of an interest in philosophy; and as such, I wasn't (very often) disappointed. This is largely pretty basic philosophy, the pill sugared by being Twilight-related, and does occasionally lapse into dryness (and in one case, into a bit of a rant). However! That was the worst of the book. Generally speaking, I enjoyed it, and will at some point read it again. It did raise some interesting points about the morality and philosophy running through the Twilight saga, and kept my attention to the end.