Maverick Philosopher

The latest edition of humorous definitions based on the names of philosophers. For example,

bahm, v. To devastate with reprints. "He bahmed the country with his latest piece."

This alludes to the philosopher Archie J. Bahm, now deceased, who taught at the University of New Mexico. His was the dubious practice of distributing philosophical pamphlets via mass mailings. If you are interested in Edward Abbey's writings, you may be interested to know that Bahm was one of Abbey's professors when the latter was a philosophy M. A. student at the University of New Mexico.

Title: Vidi, Vici, Veni.

Is life worth living?

"It all depends on the liver."

How do you get the attention of someone with a degree in English?

"Waiter!"

Here.

I'm a couple of weeks late on this, but enjoy it anyway.

Filed under: Humor

The funniest I've heard is the one offered by the Harvey Keitel character in the move, Smoke. "I lost my pen, and by the time I found it, I had run out of paper."

. . . I hear two songs. Cheech and Chong's Santa Claus and His Old Lady and Porky Pig's version of Blue Christmas.

According to this source,

Malaysia, Iran and Turkey plan to build an "Islamic car" fitted with a compass to find the direction of Mecca, and a compartment to keep the Koran in, the Malaysian state news agency said.

This invites parody.

Topping the Telegraph list is this winner: It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament. Read more. I am not posting this to make fun of Brits. The source reports that in Ohio, USA it is illegal to get a fish drunk, and that in Alabama it is illegal to drive while blindfolded. One wonders how much of this is true.

Filed under: Humor.

A beer post over at Gypsy Scholar put me in mind of an old joke. "I had me a couple of Buds, but I'm none the wiser."

After a couple of Buds I was none the wiser, so I ordered me up some lumen naturale, Natural Light.

If that's the punchline, what's the joke?

My sources tell me he had a hard time putting Descartes before the whores.

Filed under: Humor

Here. For example, Rescher died of incoherence while Spinoza died of substance abuse. Miguel de Unamuno expired from a tragic loss of sense. Plantinga perished of necessity, and Augustine by a Hippo. As you can see, some are nasty and one needn't be dead to have a cause of death assigned. Last I checked, Professor Rescher was still happily scribbling away. And that reminds me of a joke.

A student goes to visit Professor Rescher. Secretary informs her that the good doctor is not available because he is writing a book. Student replies, "I'll wait."

This old joke may be worth repeating.

Einstein and a young physicist were having a conversation. From time to time the young physicist would take out a notebook and jot something down.

"What are you doing?" Einstein asked.

"Well, whenever I get a good idea, I write it down."

"I used to do that myself once, but I had only two good ideas."

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross on the Dennis Prager show: "What do you get when you cross a Unitarian with a Ku Klux Klansman? Someone who burns a question mark on your lawn."

Filed under Humor.

A warning on an electric router made for carpenters cautions, "This product not intended for use as a dental drill." More such warnings here. And here.

A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse. "But why," they asked, as they moved off. "Because", he said, "I can't stand chess-nuts boasting in an open foyer." (HT: Ron Fox)

Swiped from: Gilleland.

. . .what might they have been called?

• Thales of Miletus: View from the Bottom of a Well

• Anaximander of Miletus: Indeterminate Musings

• Anaximenes of Miletus: Just Another Airhead Gassing Off

• Xenophanes of Colophon: Tales of Wickedness in High Places

• Heraclitus of Ephesus: The Upload and the Download are the Same.

. . .what might it have been called? The Regina Monologues. (An MP original.)

If a person who knows three languages is called trilingual, and a person who knows two languages is called bilingual, what then does one call a person who knows but one language? An American. (Via John Perry.)

. . . looking dejected. The bartender says, "What's wrong, pal?" The atom replies, "I lost an electron." Bartender: "Are you sure?" Atom: "I'm positive!"

I got a kick out of this item in a local newspaper:

The Irish Foundation of Arizona will host a spaghetti dinner 6 P.M. Saturday, Nov. 11 at the Irish Cultural Center, 1106 N. Central Avenue, Phoenix.

Meal to include home made spaghetti sauce, meatballs, sausage, Italian tossed salad, fresh baked Italian bread and desserts.

Well, Italian food sure beats boiled cabbage and whatever else the Irish eat. But the menu sounds strange. What, no pasta?

I first discovered Wicked Thoughts when the proprietor of the site, one Bussorah Merchant, e-mailed me to inform me of the antics of a character who had attacked me, a character he calls Ladderman. (One of the meanings of the German Leiter is ladder. Get it?) Shortly thereafter, I took another gander at Merchant's site and read a good chunk of the humor posts until the laughing thereby elicited induced serious concern about the integrity of my stomach wall. See here for a sample (of the humor, not my stomach wall). I now have a rich source of data for that article I always wanted to write on the philosophy of humor.

The bell you never know is there.

On the front: Islam: a religion of peace since A.D. 622.

On the back: Say otherwise and we'll blow you up.

Source: Commenter Rob Grano over at Pontifications.

Conversation in the frigidarium this morning drifted onto the weighty topic of extended service warranties. A poolmate explained how a zealous salesman tried to sell her such a warranty on a filing cabinet! It occurred to me that even more absurd would be extended warranties on ball peen hammers and anvils. Or how about coffins?

"If in the first one hundred years of your subterranean repose you should ever experience any moisture or other intrusion due to a failure of the seals, just call our toll-free number, and a repairman will come to your gravesite, exhume your coffin, make necessary repairs, and restore everything to its original condition. All at no additional expense."

Man walks into a shabby used book store in a questionable part of town. Man asks proprietor: "Shakespeare?" Proprietor: "Yes sir, we have a little room in the back."

Logically, we're poles apart.

(Via Ted Cohen, via Michael Slote.) The joke works better spoken than written. In its written form, the 'Pole'/'pole' ambiguity evaporates, and it is this ambiguity that drives the joke. I take this example as yet another piece of evidence for my claim that much (not all) humor is rooted in logico-conceptual confusion. But why such confusion should be funny, I have no idea.

Reifried beins.

Get down and hang loose. Slide from the epistemological to the ontological and back again. It's a loco-motion from one pole to the other without no reifyin' of either pole which poles are what they are only by not being what they are not.

Aristotle, Protrepticus, #53, p. 24:

. . . a preoccupation with philosophy differs most radically from all other occupations. Those who are engaged in philosophy need neither special tools nor a particular workshop for what they are doing. For wherever in the whole world one puts one's mind to work, one is able to take hold of the truth as if it were in fact omnipresent.

Indeed, philosophers are superior even to mathematicians in this regard. A mathematician needs three things, paper, pencil, and wastebasket. The philosopher doesn't need the wastebasket.

Filed under: Humor.

Some people can read a sexual meaning into, and out of, anything at all. Yet another proof that we are concupiscent from the ground up. One wonders if any post-Julian Roman hit upon this pun. Writing this, I am reminded of the gladiator joke from The Deer Hunter (1978). But I won't repeat it. Instead, I pose this trivia question:

What is the tautology uttered by the De Niro character in The Deer Hunter?

From Dean Zimmerman's Philosophical Clerihews page:

Although it hurt Curt Ducasse
to be kicked in the ass,
he was filled with elation
at the observability of the causal relation.

(Hyperlinks added.)

Though Halloween is past, the spirit remains, so:

Escaping at night from the embalmer's,
The zombies sought help from Dave Chalmers.
Though their speech was mere echolalia,
He knew what they wanted: dancing qualia.

Among the jokes classified by Ted Cohen as hermetic in Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (University of Chicago Press, 1999) are the following that he classifies as strongly hermetic:

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin, 2002), p. 11:

Philosophy today gets no respect. Many scientists use the term as a synonym for effete speculation. When my colleague Ned Block told his father that he would major in the subject, his father's reply was "Luft!" — Yiddish for "air." And then there's the joke in which a young man told his mother that he would become a Doctor of Philosophy and she said, "Wonderful! But what kind of disease is philosophy?"

"When you breathe, you inspire. When you do not breathe, you expire." "H2O is hot water, and CO2 is cold water." "To collect fumes of sulphur, hold a deacon over a flame in a test tube." "When you smell an odorless gas, it is probably carbon monoxide." "Nitrogen is not found in Ireland because it is not found in a free state." "Water is composed of two gins, Oxygin and Hydrogin. Oxygin is pure gin. Hydrogin is gin and water."

More here.

The Mensa Invitational once again asked members to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are this year's {2005} winners:

BERKELEY, CA - The Berkeley Board of Education voted last night to ban the game of Chess from all of its elementary, junior high and high schools. The board claims that Chess has a negative influence on students because of the backwards and outdated thinking that was responsible for creating the game.

One board member, Claudia Starsniffer, compiled a list of seven grievances against Chess. Starsniffer's list claims,

Recently discovered.

Excerpt:

Today I made a Black Forest cake out of five pounds of cherries and a live beaver, challenging the very definition of the word "cake." I was very pleased. Malraux said he admired it greatly, but could not stay for dessert. Still, I feel that this may be my most profound achievement yet, and have resolved to enter it in the Betty Crocker Bake-Off.

Filed under: Humor