The Secret Life of Puppets

A well-written, provocative and yet ultimately not entirely convincing account of the displacement of the Platonist worldview and its re-emergence in the form of popular entertainment. Nelson clearly sees Western culture through the lens of a dialectic of Aristotelian and Platonic thought, and she both predicts and welcomes the return of Platonism into the mainstream. Yet there are gaps in here, moments where the analysis seems superficial, eliding over contradictions, so that I sometimes wondering if Nelson is not herself making the mistake of conflating imagine with believe. It was interesting to read this book shortly after finishing Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, since there is quite a bit of overlap, and Ligotti too seems to foretell a crisis of philosophical materialism, though with quite different conclusions.