Category: Humor

Bars Philosophers Opened after being Denied Tenure

HT: Allan Jackson:
Beer and Trembling
Gin and Platonic
Phenomenology of Spirits
Martini Heidegger
Bellini and Nothingness
Jean-Jacques & Coke
Vodka on the Lockes
Maker’s Marx Old Fashioned.
To this list I add:
 
Rusty Nagel's. (If you got that, I will buy you the cocktail to which I am alluding.)
 
Continuing in the humorous vein, Allan offers:
 
Heraclitus walks into a bar.
Bartender: Oh…You again?
 
I counteroffer:
 
Zeno tries to walk into a bar.
 
Russell never walks into bars, he is only on occasion at bar-proximal places at bar-open times.
 
McTaggart, however, has no time for bars at all.
 
Van Inwagen doesn't believe in bars, but only in bottles and bricks arranged barwise.
 
Jon Barwise was not available for comment.

On ‘Stuff’ and ‘Ass’

A Substack language rant. Excerpt:

'Ass' is another word gaining a currency that is already excessive. One wonders how far it will go. Will 'ass' become an all-purpose synecdoche? Run your ass off, work your ass to the bone, get your ass out of here . . . ask a girl's father for her ass in marriage? In the expression, 'piece of ass' the reference is not to the buttocks proper, but to an adjoining area. 'Ass' appears subject to a peculiar semantic spread. It can come to mean almost anything, as in 'haul ass,' which means to travel at a high rate of speed. I don't imagine that if one were hauling donkeys one could make very good time. So how on earth did this expression arise? (I had teenage friends who could not refer to a U-Haul trailer except as a U-Haul-Ass trailer.)

Face Masks

Masks are a form of cultural appropriation. We have no right to adopt the apparel of criminals, thereby disrespecting by co-opting the accoutrement of their chosen lifestyle.  That lifestyle is who they are!  But not only that. Since criminals are disproportionately black, masks are also racist! 

Masks are also discriminatory and non-inclusive. Doesn't every pathogen have a right to migrate whithersoever it wants?  Nancy Pelosi, that shining star of political wisdom, taught us that walls are immoral using those very words; how then could masks be any less immoral? 

Kamala Harris on the Passage of Time

We here at Maverick Philosopher are classically liberal in our openness to a variety of points of view on the enduring questions of philosophy.  As long-time readers know, one of our mottoes is Nihil philosophicum a nobis alienum putamus. "We consider nothing philosophical to be foreign to us."* 

In that spirit, we offer the profound thoughts of the Vice President, thoughts that rival in depth those of Aurelius Augustinus and John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, and that push the philosophy of time in a new direction and away from the notorious B-theory of time much loved by previous Veeps.

I will leave the reader to decide whether Kamala's insights reach the level of those proffered by President Bill Clinton some years ago when he breathed new life into philosophical logic with his penetrating observation that matters of great moment  often ride on what the meaning of 'is' is. 

___________________

*The motto is modelled on Terentius: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. "I am a human being; I consider nothing human to be  foreign to me." One also sees the thought expressed in this form:  Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. Our motto is based on this variant.  Horace Jeffery Hodges informs me of a Satanic variant to be found in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov: "Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto." (I am Satan, and nothing human is foreign to me.) 

A Pronoun Puzzle: “He who hesitates is lost”

Grammatically, 'he' is a pronoun. Pronouns have antecedents. What is the antecedent of 'he' in the folk saying supra? It does not have one. 

A Yogi Berra type joke is in the offing. We're hiking. We must go forward; we can't go back. But the path forward is perilous and requires a bold step over an abysmal chasm. I say, "He who hesitates is lost!" My hiking partner, a smartass, replies, "You mean Biden?"

My witticism is modelled on a genuine Yogi Berra joke. You are asked what time it is and you reply, "You mean now?"

'He' in the folk saying is grammatically a pronoun, but it does not function logically as one. How then does it function?

I say it functions as a universal quantifier. Not like a universal quantifier, but as one. Thus:

For any x, if x hesitates, then x is lost.

This strikes me as clear as day. Rather less clear is the role of the first-person singular pronoun in 'I think, therefore I am.'  Does 'I' in this context have an antecedent, and if it does, what or who is the antecedent?   Anythng you say will land you in the aporetic frying pan. Or so I could argue.

Later.

An Old Descartes Joke

In the fall of 1989 a female student at Case Western Reserve University told me the following Descartes joke.

Our man stops at a bar, the 'tender asks whether he wants a drink, Descartes says, "I think not, then disappears. I replied, pedantically, "I think therefore I am" is not logically equivalent to "I think not therefore I am not" any more than "I am walking therefore I am moving" is logically equivalent to "I am not walking therefore I am not moving." So the joke rests on a logical mistake.

But this is true of many if not most jokes.  I have toyed with the notion that most humor stems from logico-conceptual incoherence of one sort or another, ambiguity, amphiboly, equivocation and various formal mistakes.   Another example is Yogi Berra's "If you come to a fork in the road, take it."  Or:  "Who was that lady I saw you with last night?  That was no lady, that was my wife!"  Or:  "I see you got a haircut.  No, I got 'em all cut."

Colander Girl

With apologies to Neil Sedaka, Calendar Girl. 

A 'pastafarian' idiot was allowed to wear a colander in an official DMV photo in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  Bring on the hoodies, the sombreros, the ski masks . . . .  Story here.

Does this have anything to do with the decline of the West?  Something.  It is just another little indication of the abdication of those in positions of authority.  A driver's license is an important document.  The authorities should not allow its being mocked by a dumbass with a piece of kitchenware on her head.  But Massachusetts is lousy with liberals, so what do you expect?  A liberal will tolerate anything except common sense and good judgment.

A penne for her thoughts as she strains to find something to believe in.  If only she would use her noodle.

Pasta2

Who is Caius?

Robert Paul Wolff here replies with wit and lefty snark to a charming request by one Pamela N., a personal assistant, who wants to know who Immanuel Kant is referring to when he writes, "Caius is a man; man is mortal; therefore, Caius is mortal."  Pamela confesses,

I will admit, I have not read Kant's works. I have, however, spent the last couple of hours combing through post after post after post about this particular quote from the book and cannot find a single soul who would say who they think Caius is.

In reading these many posts, I have come to the conclusion that Kant is probably referring to Pope Caius as he has been venerated by the Catholic Church as a Saint. Given that title, and the fact that Saint's [sic] are given to [sic] a quasi-immortal status [sic], I have ascertained that this is who Kant is most likely referring to. My question for you is, do you think that my assumption is correct? or do you have a deeper insight into who he is referring to?

Environmental Racism!

The other night we heard Elizabeth Warren speak of various forms of racism, including 'environmental racism.' Bear with me as I try to figure out what this might be.

An industrial polluter dumps chemicals into a river. Now rivers come in colors. Anything that has a color, however, has a race. After all, race = color. So rivers are of various races. Now the river in question that the capitalist dog sullies is a River of Color. The rapids portion of the river is of course white and therefore white supremacist; but that doesn't count since the portion of the river where the pollutants enter is brown. So what we have here is a River of Color being maltreated by a white supremacist capitalist dog.

Here, then, is a clear case of environmental racism.

Alles klar?

Addendum

Another important question is whether any river is an illegal alien. Could a river change its course in such a way as to violate the territorial sovereignty of the USA, say? The Rio Grande perhaps? Would such a river become an illegal alien river? Presumably it would. And given the leftist conflation of illegal aliens with Hispanics, would such a river be rightly deemed an Hispanic river eligible for certain perquisites and privileges such as 'free' health care? Polluted rivers need health care; to withhold such care from an Hispanic river would be racist!  We need to have a 'conversation' about this.