A philosophy professor weighs in on The Good Place

The Ringer

“First of all, it’s just cool to see the names of philosophers constantly coming up in a TV show,” says Yale philosophy professor Gideon Rosen. “It’s really not something you see every day. Philosophy is just not part of popular culture at all. A lot of that is going to be completely strange and unfamiliar to people who haven’t taken a philosophy class, and how many people in America have taken a philosophy class? So that was cool. But it’s not just seeing Plato and Aristotle and the really famous names coming up. It’s seeing contemporary academic philosophy discussed, and that just never happens. Most American academics don’t know who Judith Thompson is, or who Tim Scanlon is! But those names come up all the time in The Good Place. For us, it’s like seeing your next-door neighbor suddenly become famous.” ALSO: Jason Mantzoukas’ Derek is “a delightfully jumbled, gooey mess of a character.”