horrible moments in the history of philosophy

411 and 404 B.C.E.- Students of Socrates set about demonstrating their teacher's key claim that the study of philosophy makes one more ethical.  First, they destroy religious statues and help the Spartans defeat their own city state of Athens, and then they institute murderous reigns of blood upon the struggling democracy.  This is all topped off by establishing violently class-based dictatorships.  Sadly, both dictatorships were short-lived in Athens, and it would be over two millenniums before the philosopher king (and student of Plato and Rousseau) Pol Pot was able to finally achieve a lasting society based on Socratic principles.

330 B.C.E.- Aristotle goes to Syracuse, I mean Macedonia. His student, the not yet great Alexander, would go on to wipe up the floor with Socrates' and Plato's students.  While defeating the known world, Alexander funds Aristotle's Lyceum, the first philosophical school combining Platonistic a priori speculations with detailed empirical observations.  The new Aristotelian scientific methods yield fascinating new data for philosopher/scientists down through the ages to consider, such as Aristotle's discoveries that slaves and women lack souls, women have a different number of teeth than men, the primary function of the brain is to cool blood, and that mice spontaneously generate.

49-62 C.E.- Seneca the Younger pens several successful works of stoic philosophy demonstrating that happiness only arises as a result of a long regime of self-restraint, humility, discipline, and respect for others.  Throughout this period, the Young Emperor Nero is such an avid student that Seneca becomes his principle adviser, in the process transitioning from endoo- to enthusiastic ecto-morph, bedding countless married women, and amassing three hundred million sesterces in four years. 

525 C.E.- Boethius delivers his last words to Lady Philosophy, "You mean you can't help me out here?  Is that what you're saying?  After all we've been through, I'm actually on my own with this thing?  No. Come on. You really can't do anything?  I'm just trying to get clear on this one point, I mean. . .  OH JESUS, THAT HURTS!"  This passage is inexplicably missing from later editions of the Consolation.

1119 C.E.- Dude! That one guy Abelard? Like these other dudes totally chopped off his family jewels in a fight over this one totally hot chick.  Dude, I s*** you not, my man's all bleeding and limping around and he goes off to become a monk, but not the kung-fu kind.  They named some tuna after him?  Hey man, you want to go get high?

1626 C.E.- After an afternoon putting his empirical philosophy into action by seeing what happens when you stuff snow into a dead chicken's butt, Francis Bacon catches fatal pneumonia. As a result of his untimely death, the fortunes of radical empiricism enter a three hundred year period of decline, only to be revived by W.V.O. Quine's meticulous observation of the behavior of his two first-born in their new and improved Skinner box (the newer one not only had the floors wired for direct current, but also contained a bar they depressed with their nose for food pellets).

1784 C.E.- Immanuel Kant extracts brutal revenge upon the noisy church choir down the street by using their noon-day practice as an example of a violation of the categorical imperative.  In Kant's fevered imagination, this was to lead the choirmaster to say, "Uncle! Uncle!"  Alas, it is not to be.

1831 C.E.- Thesis: contaminated cantaloupes; Anti-Thesis: G.W.F. Hegel's digestive tract; Synthesis: heart stopping gastro-intestinal disorder.

1840 C.E.- Arthur Schopenhauer, the first great Wester philosopher to defend Hindu ideas concerning the renunciation of the will, closes his journal and smiles after penning the now immortal words, "Obit anus, abit onus."  Unlike the noisy choir that had tormented his philosophical hero Kant, Caroline Marquet never makes an appearance in Schopenhauer's philosophical writings.

1889 C.E.- Friedrich Nietzsche begins to hoard feces in a bedroom drawer.  His long suffering and devoted sister Elizabeth explains for the tenth time that he's supposed to be staring into the void, not doing this, this thing that he's doing.  But her protestations are to no avail.

1931 C.E.- In a whirlwind tour of Europe, W.V.O. Quine lunches with Rudolph Carnap, who from the Aufbau onwards explicitly argued that the unit of meaning was the language as a whole.  They discuss fellow "young turk" A.J. Ayer (who in Language, Truth, and Logic argued for a holistic form of verificationism that allowed one to hold true any proposition come what may). After returning to the United States Quine pens his revolutionary anti-positivist tract, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Philosophy is never the same!

1935 C.E.- After going bankrupt from running an ill-conceived boarding school with his now completely estranged second wife, Bertrand Russell recoups his losses by penning several best selling books telling other people how to live their lives.

1942 C.E.- After his heretofore beloved Granny refuses him a third helping of cookies and chocolate milk, Jerry Fodor vows dark revenge not just against her, but on a generation of readers as well.

1952 C.E.- After he had saved his home country and the entire free world by decrypting the German's Enigma Code and had also moved British science to the forefront of the world by developing the first digital computer, the government of Great Britain shows its gratitude by imprisoning Alan Turing for "acts of gross indecency" and then forcing him to take massive amounts of hormones to "cure" his homosexuality. 

Turing's treatment had the result not only of robbing the world of one of her greatest minds when he took his life, but also raised a lively debate in historical scholarship. How could a country ruled by such idiots possibly have managed to to keep an Empire that long?

1957 C.E.- In a public interview Martin Heidegger shamefully refuses to say that in retrospect “Arbeit Macht Frei” was a poor choice for the original opening epigraph of Sein Und Zeit.  Supporters and detractors continue to debate its appropriateness.

1962 C.E.- In between purging non-tenured linguists who disagree with the latest iteration of his theory and penning encomiums to fellow wannabe philosopher king Pol Pot, Noam Chomsky makes the bold case in an Austin, Texas ALA meeting that his opponents' pompadours are both grotesquely mistaken and at the same time merely trivial notational variants of his own pompadour.  Linguists and philosophers at the meeting initially found such arguments to be compelling.

1966 C.E.- It is the case that the automobile fast approaching down the streets of Blaricum hits L.E.J. Brouwer, or it is not the case that the automobile fast approaching down the streets of Blaricum hits L.E.J. Brouwer.

1994 C.E.- Insert (huh-huh-huh, he said "insert") joke involving Saul Kripke, rigid designation, and Princeton co-eds.  Maybe use the word "detumescent."  Oh man that's a funny adjective.

circa 1995 C.E.- Jet lag and low blood sugar from forgoing desert on the flight back from Australia combine with the aftereffects of childhood dyslexia to lead David Lewis to misread Hamlet's retort to Horatio as "There are more things dreamed of in your philosophy than in Heaven and Earth."  He drops his Shakespeare, leans over a tattered, much abused copy of "On the Plurality of Worlds," and can't quite bring himself to pick it up. [note: this entry plagiarizes Aidan McGlynn.]

2002 C.E.- All promotional material for Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman's film Derrida (about the eponymous "deconstructionist") contains the following tag line. "The world never got to watch great minds such as Plato and Socrates in action, but thanks to modern technology, this film captures one of the brilliant thinkers of the 20th century." The silence you hear now is the sound of a million T.V. babies failing to think, "but wait! I thought Plato and Socrates were against sophists. And they weren't a-hole prima donna American English Department celebrities who abused the non-sycophantic. And didn't they have more than fifteen minutes of fame?"

411 and 404 B.C.E.- Students of Socrates set about demonstrating their teacher's key claim that the study of philosophy makes one more ethical.  First, they destroy religious statues and help the Spartans defeat their own city state of Athens, and then they institute murderous reigns of blood upon the struggling democracy.  This is all topped off by establishing violently class-based dictatorships.  Sadly, both dictatorships were short-lived in Athens, and it would be over two millenniums before the philosopher king (and student of Plato and Rousseau) Pol Pot was able to finally achieve a lasting society based on Socratic principles.

330 B.C.E.- Aristotle goes to Syracuse, I mean Macedonia. His student, the not yet great Alexander, would go on to wipe up the floor with Socrates' and Plato's students.  While defeating the known world, Alexander funds Aristotle's Lyceum, the first philosophical school combining Platonistic a priori speculations with detailed empirical observations.  The new Aristotelian scientific methods yield fascinating new data for philosopher/scientists down through the ages to consider, such as Aristotle's discoveries that slaves and women lack souls, women have a different number of teeth than men, the primary function of the brain is to cool blood, and that mice spontaneously generate.

49-62 C.E.- Seneca the Younger pens several successful works of stoic philosophy demonstrating that happiness only arises as a result of a long regime of self-restraint, humility, discipline, and respect for others.  Throughout this period, the Young Emperor Nero is such an avid student that Seneca becomes his principle adviser, in the process transitioning from endoo- to enthusiastic ecto-morph, bedding countless married women, and amassing three hundred million sesterces in four years. 

525 C.E.- Boethius delivers his last words to Lady Philosophy, "You mean you can't help me out here?  Is that what you're saying?  After all we've been through, I'm actually on my own with this thing?  No. Come on. You really can't do anything?  I'm just trying to get clear on this one point, I mean. . .  OH JESUS, THAT HURTS!"  This passage is inexplicably missing from later editions of the Consolation.

1119 C.E.- Dude! That one guy Abelard? Like these other dudes totally chopped off his family jewels in a fight over this one totally hot chick.  Dude, I s*** you not, my man's all bleeding and limping around and he goes off to become a monk, but not the kung-fu kind.  They named some tuna after him?  Hey man, you want to go get high?

1626 C.E.- After an afternoon putting his empirical philosophy into action by seeing what happens when you stuff snow into a dead chicken's butt, Francis Bacon catches fatal pneumonia. As a result of his untimely death, the fortunes of radical empiricism enter a three hundred year period of decline, only to be revived by W.V.O. Quine's meticulous observation of the behavior of his two first-born in their new and improved Skinner box (the newer one not only had the floors wired for direct current, but also contained a bar they depressed with their nose for food pellets).

1784 C.E.- Immanuel Kant extracts brutal revenge upon the noisy church choir down the street by using their noon-day practice as an example of a violation of the categorical imperative.  In Kant's fevered imagination, this was to lead the choirmaster to say, "Uncle! Uncle!"  Alas, it is not to be.

1831 C.E.- Thesis: contaminated cantaloupes; Anti-Thesis: G.W.F. Hegel's digestive tract; Synthesis: heart stopping gastro-intestinal disorder.

1840 C.E.- Arthur Schopenhauer, the first great Wester philosopher to defend Hindu ideas concerning the renunciation of the will, closes his journal and smiles after penning the now immortal words, "Obit anus, abit onus."  Unlike the noisy choir that had tormented his philosophical hero Kant, Caroline Marquet never makes an appearance in Schopenhauer's philosophical writings.

1889 C.E.- Friedrich Nietzsche begins to hoard feces in a bedroom drawer.  His long suffering and devoted sister Elizabeth explains for the tenth time that he's supposed to be staring into the void, not doing this, this thing that he's doing.  But her protestations are to no avail.

1931 C.E.- In a whirlwind tour of Europe, W.V.O. Quine lunches with Rudolph Carnap, who from the Aufbau onwards explicitly argued that the unit of meaning was the language as a whole.  They discuss fellow "young turk" A.J. Ayer (who in Language, Truth, and Logic argued for a holistic form of verificationism that allowed one to hold true any proposition come what may). After returning to the United States Quine pens his revolutionary anti-positivist tract, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Philosophy is never the same!

1935 C.E.- After going bankrupt from running an ill-conceived boarding school with his now completely estranged second wife, Bertrand Russell recoups his losses by penning several best selling books telling other people how to live their lives.

1942 C.E.- After his heretofore beloved Granny refuses him a third helping of cookies and chocolate milk, Jerry Fodor vows dark revenge not just against her, but on a generation of readers as well.

1952 C.E.- After he had saved his home country and the entire free world by decrypting the German's Enigma Code and had also moved British science to the forefront of the world by developing the first digital computer, the government of Great Britain shows its gratitude by imprisoning Alan Turing for "acts of gross indecency" and then forcing him to take massive amounts of hormones to "cure" his homosexuality. 

Turing's treatment had the result not only of robbing the world of one of her greatest minds when he took his life, but also raised a lively debate in historical scholarship. How could a country ruled by such idiots possibly have managed to to keep an Empire that long?

1957 C.E.- In a public interview Martin Heidegger shamefully refuses to say that in retrospect “Arbeit Macht Frei” was a poor choice for the original opening epigraph of Sein Und Zeit.  Supporters and detractors continue to debate its appropriateness.

1962 C.E.- In between purging non-tenured linguists who disagree with the latest iteration of his theory and penning encomiums to fellow wannabe philosopher king Pol Pot, Noam Chomsky makes the bold case in an Austin, Texas ALA meeting that his opponents' pompadours are both grotesquely mistaken and at the same time merely trivial notational variants of his own pompadour.  Linguists and philosophers at the meeting initially found such arguments to be compelling.

1966 C.E.- It is the case that the automobile fast approaching down the streets of Blaricum hits L.E.J. Brouwer, or it is not the case that the automobile fast approaching down the streets of Blaricum hits L.E.J. Brouwer.

1994 C.E.- Insert (huh-huh-huh, he said "insert") joke involving Saul Kripke, rigid designation, and Princeton co-eds.  Maybe use the word "detumescent."  Oh man that's a funny adjective.

circa 1995 C.E.- Jet lag and low blood sugar from forgoing desert on the flight back from Australia combine with the aftereffects of childhood dyslexia to lead David Lewis to misread Hamlet's retort to Horatio as "There are more things dreamed of in your philosophy than in Heaven and Earth."  He drops his Shakespeare, leans over a tattered, much abused copy of "On the Plurality of Worlds," and can't quite bring himself to pick it up. [note: this entry plagiarizes Aidan McGlynn.]

2002 C.E.- All promotional material for Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman's film Derrida (about the eponymous "deconstructionist") contains the following tag line. "The world never got to watch great minds such as Plato and Socrates in action, but thanks to modern technology, this film captures one of the brilliant thinkers of the 20th century." The silence you hear now is the sound of a million T.V. babies failing to think, "but wait! I thought Plato and Socrates were against sophists. And they weren't a-hole prima donna American English Department celebrities who abused the non-sycophantic. And didn't they have more than fifteen minutes of fame?"

Comments

[Undergrad]

Jon-

This is unrelated to your post, but I was just wondering when you were going to be back teaching classes. I thought you were totally cool and all the undergrad's miss you a bunch! Hope all is well.

Hurry back!

-Anonymous

[Jon Cogburn]

Thanks tons! Teaching (and learning from) you guys is a blast, by far one of the coolest things in my life.

We'll be back from Oklahoma next Fall. I will probably teach PHIL 2010 (this is Logic, usually handled by a really good instructor we just hired; but I'd like to free him up to teach a 3,000 level class once a year if he wants to and the dept. allows) and PHIL 7000 (the grad seminar) in Fall, and then probably something more interesting in Spring.

Jon

[Iron Man]

Since it was brought up: I'd like to point out that I am actually taking a class instructed by the instructor of whom professor Cogburn is speaking. I was skeptical about this guy towards the beginning of the semester.

He seemed to me to be a raving modernist. In fact, a glossary viewing of the readings he assigned for his intro class support this view. His vehement insistence that he is, in fact, not a scholar Aristotle might even drive this point home for many. Of course, when I asked him on that first class whether or not we'd be dealing with anything but "The subject (which is to say, that which is concerned solely with man and how he relates to other things)," which is to say "Are we gonna be dealing with the Object (which is to say, something of the sort as Plato's Good) for the sake of itself, and he was like "Uh...what are you talking about" and that second day (I think) when he actually had the nerve to claim that 2 universal statements were contradictory...this did not help my view of him at all.

On the other hand, he is an awesome instructor...insofar as instructors can be considered awesome. His PHIL 1000 classes are primarily discussion oriented. Of course, I am probably biased, insofar as I just tend to rock out at this sort of thing.

Argument: Qualia have evolved (For the physicalists).

Me: Yeah...but the whole argument is bogus. Man did not evolve...this is truly a silly idea.

In any case, professor: Have you considered what 3000+ level courses you plan on teaching during the said fall?

I was actually able to register for the 4010 level logic this spring, and so I am quite stoked about that. If you are teaching anything worth learning in the spring, I shall be most excited.

[Iron Man]

Or Spring of 2009, for that matter.

[Iron Man]

Dear Gosh, I need to learn to read.

To clear things up: You said you are coming back in the Fall, and are teaching X and Y. So I suppose the point I was getting at is "What are you teaching either in the 3000 level or 4000 level the next time (Presumably the Spring after the Fall after this Spring) when you are teaching such a class?"

[Jon Cogburn]

I'll do some kind of special topics at the 3,000 level, maybe just a general philosophy of language class as a move towards getting something like that on the books. For the other class, I'll either do the 4,000 level mind, 4,000 level metaphysics, or the honors intro (1001), depending on how much work the 3,000 is.

It's really hard to get up to speed with teaching when you are right out of graduate school, and even harder when you have a 4-4 load (as I did myself at the time). So awesomeness on any dimension is a real achievement.

[Iron Man]

Don't get me wrong, the "not awesome" factors that I mentioned were entirely first impressions...with perhap the exception of his "I am not a scholar of Aristotle" objections (To put it into context, one of the factors of the Mind-Body problem was the causal closure of physics [I think], and this is to say...that all causes are physical which have physical effects, and everything can only have one cause. So I was like "Dude...that's clearly wrong. Aristotle had 4 causes." "Er...I am not a scholar of Aristotle." Haha)

And the universals problem has become quite humorous. For the past exam, he made quite certain that, when he worded the exam, and wanted to ask about "compatible statements," that if he wanted to make a universal statement incompatible with something else, he put an existential statement. I was quite pleased.

At any rate, I suppose the point I am ultimately getting at is that, in any case, I'd strongly suggest this instructor to anyone wanting to take his intro to philosophy class in the future in such a case that he is teaching it.

[Drew]

Why couldn't it be the case that Aristotle was wrong? Not following you there.

[Iron Man]

Drew, I don't disagree that Aristotle often was wrong...especially on the points where he disagreed with the Master Plato. But as concerning his theory of change and becoming?

[Drew]

I'm just saying that simply appealing to Aristotle isn't much of an argument against what your teacher was saying, especially since he's admittedly not much into him.

[Chris]

That's a bad-ass pic of Quine

[Iron Man]

Posh, Drew. No reasonable person can "not be much into Aristotle." Any such person is clearly mad.