Philosophy joke

An analytic philosopher and a continental philosopher walk into a bar. The bartender asks, “wadda ya havin?” The continental philosopher replies, “I will require an authentic, discursively enjoined, post-structuralist, disimmediated thing-in-itself.”

The bartender shakes his head and says, “I don’t get what you want.” The continental philosopher turns his nose up in the air and storms out of the bar. The bartender looks apologetically to the analytic philosopher and says, “I really couldn’t understand him.”

“Oh, I know!” replies the analytic philosopher. “As for me, I’ll have the same, without the adjectives.”

(Via Atoms Arranged Meaningwise.)

Ode on a Holbovian Urn

John Holbo has posted a flickr set of illustrations from a Plato book he's working on.

This one is my favorite, although I'm not sure which dialogue it's illustrating.

Philosophy on the rise

The New York Times reports that philosophy is gaining in popularity as a major.

Sadly, I can't say that my experience in philosophy confirms the last two paragraphs of the article.

Jenna Schaal-O’Connor, a 20-year-old sophomore who is majoring in cognitive science and linguistics, said philosophy had other perks. She said she found many male philosophy majors interesting and sensitive.

"That whole deep existential torment," she said. "It’s good for getting girlfriends."

Hedging against Pascal

Prof. Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution links to a summary of a debate on "wealth and happiness" in which he was a participant. But the interesting bit was what followed the debate:

Justin Wolfers of the Wharton Business School spoke on Pascal's Wager, saying that if one believes in religion then the greatest risk is choosing the wrong one. And how to hedge against such a risk? Mr. Wolfers advises the following: Have lots of children and bring each one up under a different faith. That way, if people don't get into heaven themselves, at least they will have maximized the chances that one of their children will.

Now usually the comments at MR are worthless, but there are quite a few funny ones in that thread. I especially liked this one:

What kind of degenerate excuse for economics is that? Where are the covariances of the kids' doomed immortal souls? Where is the higher-order game theoretical intractability proof? Where are the nonlinearities of utility functions under the possibility that an omnipotent God can create payoffs so large that even he can't compare them? It sounds as though it might have involved no Greek letters at all...

Is our children learning philosophy?

Prof. Peter Smith of Cambridge wonders whether introductory philosophy classes are counter-productive.

I remember Geoffrey Hunter (the author of the rather good Metalogic) telling me years ago that at the beginning of his intro logic course, having explained the idea of a valid argument, he gave out a sheet of examples to see which arguments beginners naively judged to be valid and which not. Then, at the end of the course, he gave out the same example sheet, asked which arguments were valid ... and people on average did worse.

Well, you can see why. Students learn some shiny new tools and are then tempted to apply the tools mindlessly, so e.g. faced with inferences involving conditionals, despite all your warnings, they crank a truth-table, and out comes a silly answer.

Likewise, students uncorrupted by philosophy could of course reel off a list of scientific theories that have been seriously proposed in the past but which -- they'd agree -- have been shown to be wrong (the phlogiston theory of combustion, the plum pudding model of the atom, and so on and so forth). But teach students some philosophy of science and ask them if you can falsify a theory and they now firmly tell you that it can't be done (merrily arguing from the flaws of Popper's falsificationism to the impossibility of showing any theory is false). Sigh. Of course, the same students will -- in another answer -- also tell you that scientific realism is in deep trouble because of the pessimistic induction from all those false past theories ...

We try not to addle our students' brains, but I fear we do.