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Lawrence, Matt. Like a Splinter in Your Mind: The Philosophy Behind the Matrix Trilogy. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 224 pp. Soft cover. ISBN 1-4051-2524-1. $19.95.
At first glance, Matt Lawrence's Like a Splinter in Your Mind: The Philosophy Behind the Matrix Trilogy appears to be a book about the Matrix franchise. Below the quotation in the title, the cover features a head that might belong to Morpheus on a green background. Inside the books can be found many more quotations from the films, as well as from the videogame and The Animatrix (2003), alongside information about the plot and many of the series' allusions. However, this book isn't really about the Matrix series; rather, this book is about the great questions of the philosophical tradition. It's just that the Wachowskis provided so many useful illustrations for perspectives on these questions that Lawrence sees no need to mine any other source to illustrate an introduction to philosophy.
Like a Splinter in Your Mind can be evaluated according to two different potential authences. It reads like a cool textbook for an "Introduction to Philosophy" course, and one can easily see how to plan a semes ter-long course around the book: Show the movies during the first week and then read the book and discuss the "questions that drive us" for the rest of the term. Or maybe the book is for the fans who have become aware of the philosophical underpinnings of the series and want to know more about philosophy. My point is that, unlike most of the scholarly books dealing with the Matrix series, Like a Splinter in Your Mind is not an analysis. Rather, it is an overview that uses characters and events from the Matrix franchise to illustrate important philosophical concepts from metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology, as well as philosophies of the mind, religion, and politics. That the book is an overview both of the Matrix franchise and of philosophy reveals its limitations. Lawrence could go farther both in exploring the philosophical roots of the series and in examining the philosophical...