Philosophy

Aristotle’s Categories & The Hunting of the Snark

I have been developing my theory that Aristotle’s categories fits the order of characters and events of Wonderland and The Looking-Glass. In the process, I realized that The Hunting of the Snark has ten characters with no individual names but whose jobs start with B, and that each could fit with Aristotle’s ten categories, types of being, as well. If Carroll used Aristotle’s categories to plot out Alice’s adventures, it is not unlikely that the Snark works like a logic puzzle. In his Game of Logic, Carroll similarly listed buns, babies, beetles and battledores (an early badminton racket) as examples of things, also known as beings. In Carroll’s introduction he says his work shows he is incapable of nonsense, and this brief but instructive poem includes precise arithmetic truth and natural history, both which apply to Aristotle’s categories.

Edward Guiliano pointed out that the Bellman looks like Father Time and carries a school bell for lessons. The best candidates for each of Aristotle’s categories are: the Bellman is time, the Boots is place, the Maker of Bonnets and Hoods is position, birth and death, the Barrister who dreams of the pig’s trial is relations, the Broker who values the goods is quality, the Billiard-Maker who chalks his own nose is action, the Banker is state, the Beaver who knits lace is passion, the Butcher who carves things up, dresses formally for the fight and teaches the Beaver addition is quantity, and the Baker who leaves everything on the beach, wears many layers, bakes brides cake, doesn’t lie, forgets his specific name and fades away, vanishing without a trace in the end is substance.

March 9, 2020 0

Tiffany Versus Kierkegaard: I Think We’re Horribly Free Now

Tiffany once rigorously speculated that she thinks we’re alone now, and that there doesn’t seem to be anyone around. Kierkegaard said God has left us wonderfully and horribly free, and we are continuously faced with the individuality of untethered existential freedom. Both agree that there doesn’t seem to be anyone around, but Kierkegaard accepts the role faith plays in the projection of all desire, belief and action in an undefined, changing world, while Tiffany remains staunchly agnostic, refusing to say whether or not there seems to be someone around, or whether or not we individuals can achieve either faith or certainty in any way that brings us collective closure.

October 22, 2019 0

December 4, 2017 0

Ponderous Walrus Ponders: What does it all mean?

What does it all mean?

Can everything mean something in particular? What do walruses mean?

What does this pondering walrus mean to you right now? What will this walrus mean to you in twenty years? If your children’s children discover this secret meaning a century from now, would they approve?

Do walruses typically need approval? Why do you? Does it have anything to do with asking about what things mean?

What does it all mean?

December 3, 2017 0

Mazu Says Your Fist Is A Hand

Mazu Daoyi Zen Chan master

The Tang dynasty Zen master Mazu (709 – 788), famed for shouting, striking his students and giving them strange, uncommon answers to questions, one said:

When you make a fist with your hand,

your fist is nothing but the hand.

September 26, 2017 0

It’s All In The Game: Eco, Fascism & Wittgenstein

umberto-eco

In Umberto Eco’s piece on fascism for the New York Review of Books, he uses Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance and example of games to understand the “structured confusion” of fascism:

The notion of fascism is not unlike Wittgenstein’s notion of a game. A game can be either competitive or not, it can require some special skill or none, it can or cannot involve money. Games are different activities that display only some “family resemblance,” as Wittgenstein put it. Consider the following sequence:

1 2 3 4

abc bcd cde def

wittgenstein

Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is characterized by the features abc, group two by the features bcd, and so on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one.

This is a point that can be made about fascism, apples, cats, philosophers, or anything else in our world. I typically use apples to explain this idea of Wittgenstein, and was pleasantly surprised to find Eco using it to understand fascism, as I am teaching Wittgenstein for Intro Philosophy this week, and fascism for Social & Political Philosophy next semester.

November 29, 2016 0

Stand Up Philosopher

I have enjoyed this bit from Mel Brooks’ History of the World since I was a little kid.

So good, but “Grrrrrrrr…”

November 10, 2015 2

Magritte’s Son of Man & Object Concealing Subject

In discussing Buddhism and the subjectivity of perspective, one of my students mentioned Magritte’s Son of Man, the famous painting of an apple concealing a man’s face. The apple, an object we desire, conceals the subject, the idea that lies behind this painting. Reality appears to us as simply there, bare and objective, which conceals that our reality is also our own individual perspective, which we learn through investigation and reflection. Much of human experience and the history of philosophy across the globe is concerned with either separating the objective from the subjective or describing how the two are intertwined. One couldn’t ask for a more perfect illustration than Magritte’s painting, whose title suggests that this has been the simple problem in the faces of all the descendants of Adam and Eve ever since the apple.

October 5, 2015 2

Wittgenstein & the Mad Tea Party of Wonderland

The Journal of the Philosophical Society of England just posted an article I wrote for them about Wittgenstein and the work of Lewis Carroll, one of my favorite subjects. Here is the link: