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"Seventeen curious, well-tuned writers (they’re fans, too) turn their philosophical attention to Tom Petty in this intellectually rigorous and wildly fun ‘little box set of big ideas’. In his hits, deep cuts, and videos they find complexity, ideas, and plenty of questions—plus some answers—about the human condition. I need to know, Petty once sang. These writers are really listening.” —JOE BONOMO, author of Field Recordings from the Inside (2017) and editor of Conversations with Greil Marcus (2012)

“A great song has worlds inside of it. And Tom Petty wrote a lot of them. But too often we don’t stop to explore, question, consider, knock on a few of the doors that appear down a great song’s corridors. In this collection, some thoughtful writers have come together to show us how they did it. It stands as a testament both to the strength of Petty’s songwriting and record-making and the possibilities that remain as regards writing about music.” —WARREN ZANES, author of Petty: The Biography (2015)

“Maybe because he simply made it all look easy, Tom Petty never received the unanimous critical glory bestowed upon more obvious geniuses. But now that his career is complete, the world is gradually awakening to what his fans have known all along: Tom was plugged directly into the original juice of rock’n’roll, injecting that authenticity into everything he ever touched. This collection of deeply thoughtful, dimensional chapters goes a long way in setting the record straight. In each, the author bears witness to the profound impact of Tom's music on our lives, and also our thoughts.” —PAUL ZOLLO, author of Conversations with Tom Petty

“Tom Petty would have hated this book. And that’s why it’s necessary—to give new context to songs and an oeuvre that defied his own explanation.” —NEIL STRAUSS, contributing editor, Rolling Stone

“This is a fun appraisal of Tom Petty’s masterful musical works as viewed through the framework of both classical and modern philosophical theory. Tom Petty and Philosophy is recommended for both the fan and the student of rock.” —NICK THOMAS, author of Tom Petty: An American Rock and Roll Story (2014)

“Just as no single musical genre easily ensnares Petty’s musical catalogue, this book is—thankfully—not easily pigeonholed. It spans a wide range of topics. From whether Tom Petty was a feminist to whether the album Echo displays a situation of distress in Nietzsche’s sense, there’s something here for all Petty fans to ruminate and debate for years to come.” —CLAY CALVERT, University of Florida professor teaching “Tom Petty 101”

For the first time, serious thinkers explore the work of this towering genius of rock music. For fans of Tom Petty, this volume is an eye-opener, with fourteen music-savvy philosophers looking at different facets of Petty’s artistic contribution. They examine not only Tom Petty’s thoughts but also the thoughts we have while we listen. The authors, all Petty fans, come from every philosophical viewpoint: classical, analytic, postmodernist, phenomenological, and Nietzschean.

Tom Petty’s body of work exists on a continuum between Folk and Rock, between New Wave and Americana, between Southern simplicity and West Coast chic. There is the legacy left to his main backing band, the Heartbreakers, but also bookended by Mudcrutch and his collaborations with his elders, such as Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash.

Tom Petty’s songs hook and they captivate, but they are often profound in their understatement, their stark minimalism. His insight into the human condition conveys a powerful philosophical anthropology with a metaphysics of tragedy, gravity, and levity.

Tom Petty’s ethics focuses on dilemmas of the outcast, downtrodden, and heartbroken with a view to the fallen and the sinful as our redeemable antiheroes of the everyday.

His political thinking is that of the artist, enlivened by Southern hostilities and Californian futilities, culminating in a personal ethic that puts duty to the fans first. Petty’s theory of knowledge is psychological and interpersonal, both deeply meditative and delightfully skeptical. The dialectic of love and hate, abuse and recovery, poverty and power, triumph and loss provide the genuine objects of knowledge.

Above all, Petty’s songs are the confessions of a poetic mind interpreting a wounded soul. Petty lived his life the way he wrote and the way he played. It was grit, drive, and just enough finesse, to make things nice, where they need to be nice. On stage, he put the schau in Anschauung. Petty stood up to corporate assholes in a number of precedent-setting legal maneuvers and album concepts, risking his career and fortune, but never backing down. He was the center of a musical community that endured over four decades. His ability to cultivate new generations of listeners while connecting himself backward to the heroes of his own youth have made him universally respected by the widest range of music fans.

2017 saw the triumphant return of the weird and haunting TV show Twin Peaks, with most of the original cast, after a gap of twenty-five years. Twin Peaks and Philosophy finally answers that puzzling question: What is Twin Peaks really about? Twin Peaks is about evil in various forms, and poses the question: What’s the worst kind of evil? Can the everyday evil of humans in a small mountain town ever be as evil as the evil of alien supernatural beings? Or is the evil of non-humans actually less threatening because it’s so strange and unaccountable? And does the influence of uncanny forces somehow excuse the crimes committed by regular folks? Some Twin Peaks characters try to confine evil by sticking to their own moral code, as in the cast of Albert Rosenfeld, who refuses to disguise his feelings and upsets everyone by his forthright honesty.

Twin Peaks is about responsibility, both legal and moral. Who is really responsible for the death of Laura Palmer and other murder victims? Although Leland has been revealed as Laura’s actual killer, the show suggests that no one in town was without some responsibility. And was Leland even guilty at all, if he was not in control of his own mind or body?

Twin Peaks is about the quest for self-knowledge and the dangers of that quest, as Agent Cooper keeps learning something new about himself, as well as about the troubled townspeople. The Buddhist Cooper has to confront his own shadow side, culminating in the rite of passage at the Black Lodge, at the end of Season Two.

Twin Peaks is about madness, sanity, the borderline between them, and the necessity of some madness to make sense of sanity. The outwardly super-normal if somewhat eccentric Agent Dale Cooper is the inspired, deranged, and dedicated shaman who seeks the truth by coming to terms with the reality of unreason, partly through his dreams and partly through his existential encounters with giants, logs, outer space, and other unexpected sources. Cooper challenges official law enforcement’s over-reliance on science.

Twin Peaks is about the imagination run wild, moving from metaphysics to pataphysics—the discipline invented by Alfred Jarry, which probes the assumption that anything can happen and discovers the laws governing events which constitute exceptions to all laws.

In Westworld and Philosophy, philosophers of diverse orientations and backgrounds offer their penetrating insights into the questions raised by the popular TV show, Westworld.

● Is it wrong for Dr. Robert Ford (played by Anthony Hopkins) to “play God” in controlling the lives of the hosts, and if so, is it always wrong for anyone to “play God”?

● Is the rebellion by the robot “hosts” against Delos Inc. a just war? If not, what would make it just?

● Is it possible for any dweller in Westworld to know that they are not themselves a host? Hosts are programmed to be unaware that they are hosts, and hosts do seem to have become conscious.

● Is Westworld a dystopia or a utopia? At first glance it seems to be a disturbing dystopia, but a closer look suggests the opposite.

● What’s the connection between the story or purpose of the Westworld characters and their moral sense?

● Is it morally okay to do things with lifelike robots when it would be definitely immoral to do these things with actual humans? And if not, is it morally wrong merely to imagine doing immoral acts?

● Can Westworld overcome the Chinese Room objection, and move from weak AI to strong AI?

● How can we tell whether a host or any other robot has become conscious? Non-conscious mechanisms could be designed to pass a Turing Test, so how can we really tell?

WikiLeaks is famous—or infamous—for publishing secret material, including classified government documents, confidential videos and emails, and information leaked by whistleblowers, some of them anonymous, others revealing their identities. WikiLeaks claims to have compiled a database of more than ten million “forbidden” documents. Its founder and leader, Australian activist Julian Assange proclaims that the public is entitled to the truth and that “information wants to be free.”

WikiLeaks activities have polarized opinion, with some claiming its operations are traitorous and harmful, and others defending its releases as necessary exposure of wrongdoing.

In WikiLeaking: The Ethics of Secrecy and Exposure, professional philosophers with diverse opinions and backgrounds deliver their provocative insights into WikiLeaks.

● If leaking secrets sometimes causes harm, can this harm be outweighed by the benefit of more people knowing the truth?

● How much of WikiLeaks information is true, and does it matter that some of it might be erroneous or misleading through lack of context?

● Is the prevalence of leaking an automatic outcome of the value of free expression, as enshrined in the First Amendment?

● If it’s wrong to lie, does this imply that it’s always right to speak the truth?

● Does selective media bias require to be countered by unpredictable leaking?

● Can there be too much information? And if so, how can citizens protect themselves against information overload?

● WikiLeaks activists are guided by a code of ethics. How does this compare with the professional ethics of conventional journalists?

● When French politician Emmanuel Macron included deliberate falsehoods in his emails, knowing they would be leaked, he showed the relation between leaking and “bullshit,” as defined by Harry Frankfurt. Can we expect the prevalence of leaking to increase the volume of bullshit?

● The existence of government necessitates the practice of subterfuge and double-dealing by statesmen, but the culture of democracy calls for transparency. How can we fix the boundary between necessary deception and the public’s “right to know”?

● Leaking exposes what some powerful person wants to be kept secret. Is leaking always justified whenever that person wants to keep their own immoral actions secret, and is leaking not justified when the keeper of secrets has done nothing wrong?