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Monday, September 05, 2005

Philosophical humour 

Spurred into looking for philosophical theories of humour by a comment Chris made in the post below, I instead found several pages of philosophy-related humour. These are all fairly geeky, but I enjoyed them anyway. Here's some of the bits that made me laugh:

Proofs that P:

I know that P is true because I teach it to my undergraduates. Therefore P. [John Searle]

It would be nice to have a deductive argument that p from self- evident premises. Unfortunately I am unable to provide one. So I will have to rest content with the following intuitive considerations in its support: p. [Rawls]

Someday someone might discover that P, and I want to get the credit. Therefore P. [Colin McGinn]

The argument for not-P has seven steps, and I'm way too old for that. Therefore P. [John Searle (again)]

Definitions:

Substance - an accident waiting to happen
Substance abuse - medieval philosophy
Thing-in-itself - marked by a condition of extreme ontological shyness
Polis - abandoned city north of the Republic
Praxis - how do you get to Polis? praxis, praxis, praxis...

Causes of death for the philosophers

Augustine: Hippo
Bentham: Fell off his stilts
Berkeley: Divine neglect
Hegel: Gave up the Geist
Kant: Found the means to his own end
Plato: Caved in
Rawls: Unveiled
Rousseau: Contract job
Vico: Recycled

And finally, it's philosophical porn movies.

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