If Minds Had Toes by Lucy Eyre is about the world of philosophy as seen by a teenage boy.
Ben Wagner is quite happy playing football and frying chips for his summer job at Cod Almighty. Happy enough, that is, until Lila orders a bag of chips and asks him if he thinks the chips taste the same to him as it does to her. How do we really know? How do we know if “salty” means the same to you as it does to me? How do we know what happiness is?
The next thing you know Ben is crawling through the towel closet for regular chats with Lila in the World of Ideas, the land where philosophers go when they die. A land where they just talk and talk and talk about philosophy.
This is the Narnia-meets-Wizard-of-Oz version of Philosophy.
The World of Ideas a rather boring place, which is suddenly seeing excitement due to a bet between Socrates and Wittgenstein. The bet is whether philosophy can (Socrates) or can’t (Wittgenstein) make a person’s life better–a regular bloke, a Joseph Blogg, a Joe Blo’s life better.
Enter Ben through the closet.
If Minds Had Toes … then we would tickle them.
Lucy Eyre does a great job of tickling her readers’ minds.
All the age-old questions are on display: free will, right vs. wrong, ethics, morals … it’s philosophy 101.
I’d say that If Minds Had Toes by Lucy Eyre is a good book for teens, more so than for adults interested in philosophy.
I don’t think it’s pitched that way but at age 15, 16, you do start thinking about free will and the larger universe and whether there is a god or a powerful being, what is right and wrong. Lucy has a way of portraying straight-up philosophy in an entertaining way. So much so that I’ve started to understand why someone could argue that we do not have free will.
My mind has been tickled.