Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar . . .

Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein

7 annotations Jun 2023 data

fm2

  • If you find that infinite regress is getting you nowhere fast, you might consider the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo—creation out of nothing—or, as John Lennon put it in a slightly different context, "Before Elvis, there was nothing."
  • The construction and payoff of jokes and the construction and payoff of philosophical concepts are made out of the same stuff. They tease the mind in similar ways. That's because philosophy and jokes proceed from the same impulse: to confound our sense of the way things are, to flip our worlds upside down, and to ferret out hidden, often uncomfortable, truths about life. What the philosopher calls an insight, the gagster calls a zinger.
  • The doctor said, "Let me tell you a story. A man went hunting, but instead of a gun, he picked up an umbrella by mistake. When a bear suddenly charged at the man, he picked up the umbrella, shot the bear, and killed it." The man said, "Impossible. Someone else must have shot that bear." The doctor said, "My point exactly!" You couldn't ask for a better illustration of the Argument from Analogy, a philosophical ploy currently (and erroneously) being used in the argument for Intelligent Design (i.e., if there's an eyeball, there must be an Eyeball-Designer-in-the -Sky.)

c01

  • Funny stuff—but, unfortunately, it all misconstrues Leibniz's thesis. Leibniz was a rationalist, a philosophical term-of-trade for someone who thinks that reason takes precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge (as opposed, for example, to an empiricist, who maintains that the senses are the primary path to knowledge.)
  • The optimist says, "The glass is half full." The pessimist says, "The glass is half empty." The rationalist says, "This glass is twice as big as it needs to be."
  • Rudy and the V.C. took their cue from the fourteenth-century theologian William Occam, who came up with the principle of parsimony, aka "Occam's razor." This principle declares that, "Theories should not be any more complex than necessary." Or, as Occam put it metaphysically, theories should not "multiply entities unnecessarily."

c02

  • In his critique of inductive logic, twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper argued that in order for a theory to hold water, there must be some possible circumstances that could demonstrate it to be false.