And maybe the problem with philosophy isn't that it isn't funny, but maybe that it's the joke. So apparently, Plato never walks into a bar with a Platypus, but maybe you weren't looking for answers to profoundly cosmological questions. But what is perverse? Another conundrum and something that may be outside of philosophy and into something that considers itself practical, like psychology. This, say the authors, is a perfect example of a mashup between the Supreme Categorical Imperative, a Kantian concept that most of us know as the more familiar golden rule, and individual proclivities, which if sufficiently perverse, can render the Golden Rule useless as a system of morality for all of us. ![]() The joke, however, is too good to pass up, apparently.Īnd then there is my own personal favorite:Ī sadist is a masochist who follows the golden rule. Autological and heterological are the correct terms, if you are looking to make an impression at a cocktail party, though the authors decline to explain the exact mechanism of the problem, which may be just as well. The problem here, which was first pointed out by Bertrand Russell, an eminent philosopher and the dissertation director of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the man who may have ruined philosophy for all time, is the difficulty between words that refer to themselves and those that don't. If a man tries to fail and succeeds, which did he do? So, they ask, where were you when your first read this: But there are easier versions of the same conundrum, which the authors contend, most men have seen written on bathroom walls somewhere during their lives (they don't know what happens in the next room over). That's a mind bender the first eleven times. Does the barber shave himself? If he does, he doesn't. There is a town in which the sole barber - a man, by the way - shaves all the townsmen, and only those townsmen, who do not shave themselves. So there isn't much teaching going on, but if you want to be generous (and why not?) you could allow as how there is a modest amount of reinforcing in the frivolity. And, as is true for all of these, it's easier to see the joke as a reflection of the philosophical principle than the philosophy in the joke. In terms of philosophical profundity, that's small potatoes. Which you will find out only if you have enough money. There is no bias towards even-ing things out on the next throw, though the balance should work out if you take enough turns. A perfectly balanced wheel has an exactly even chance of dropping in a red or a black each time the spinning wheel is spun. If the ball drops in a black slot six times in a row, the odds favor the next ball will land in red. A roulette wheel, explain the authors, has half red and half black slots. That is an example of the Monte Carlo Strategy, a famous logical fallacy that many people don't recognize as a fallacy and many more don't recognize even that it is incorrect, since on the surface, it makes sense. because the overwhelming odds are there won't be two guys on the same plane with a bomb. If you are getting on a commercial airline, for safety's sake, take a bomb with you. Nobody likes a pedant, and there's no buzz-kill like explaining a joke, so here are some examples: Which aims to put the fun back into philosophy. And besides, when was the last time you ran into one? So the authors of Plato and a Platypus have a plan: it's called Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes. Useless, archaic and worst of all, not basically fun. The point being that philosophers have a bad name. And they didn't say, either, what they told their daughter, except to intimate that a mumbled half-truth finessed the whole thing into the soon-forgotten world of other temporary childhood aspirations. They didn't think they had to explain given its obvious ridiculousness. The parents didn't say what their objection was. Shoot, any philosopher worth her orotund salt can't even define the problem in 140 characters. Or maybe the life of a card-carrying philosopher is just out of step, an atavism from some earlier world that doesn't have a purchase in the on-line, chatter-filled world of 140-character tweets. And somehow the life of a philosopher failed one or more of these, they didn't say which. But they also want to guide their children, pointing them towards a life path that is some combination of rewarding, satisfying and remunerative. Because, after all, they are good people who want to tell their children the truth. ![]() That simple declaration dilemma-ized her parents big time. So she asked her parents, "Is there still such a thing as philosophers, because I think I want to be one." I know a young person, a fairly precocious young girl of eight years, who learned that, once upon a time, there were people called philosophers, people who spent their days philosophizing, that is sitting around thinking deep thoughts about the nature of things.
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