I'm so smart, I find these funny.
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The First Law of Philosophy-
For every philosopher, there exists an equal and opposite philosopher.
The Second Law of Philosophy-
They're both wrong.
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Descartes is sitting in a bar, having a drink. The bartender asks him if he would like another. 'I think not,' he says and vanishes in a puff of logic.
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Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French cafe, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness. He says to the waitress, 'I'd like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream.' The waitress replies, 'I'm sorry, monsieur, but we're out of cream. How about with no milk?'
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Question: How do you get a philosopher off your porch?
Answer: Pay for the pizza.
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Dean, to the physics department. 'Why do I always have to give you guys so much money, for laboratories and expensive equipment and stuff. Why couldn't you be like the math department - all they need is money for pencils, paper and waste-paper baskets. Or even better, like the philosophy department. All they need are pencils and paper.'
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An engineer, an experimental physicist, a theoretical physicist, and a philosopher were hiking through the hills of Scotland. Cresting the top of one hill, they see, on top of the next, a black sheep. The engineer says: 'What do you know, the sheep in Scotland are black.' 'Well, *some* of the sheep in Scotland are black,' replies the experimental physicist. The theoretical physicist considers this for a moment and says 'Well, at least one of the sheep in Scotland is black.' 'Well,' the philosopher responds, 'on one side, anyway.'
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A philosopher falls asleep and dreams. In his dream, one by one, the greatest philosophers of all time stand before him and systematically state their views and arguments: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Descartes, etc. But in each case the philosopher, dramatically pointing his finger at the presenter, was able to come up with a devastating objection that left the presenting philosopher speechless and unable to effectively reply. In fact, the philosopher realized it was the same objection in every case - he had found the perfect philosophical move to make in conferences and colloquia. He forced himself to wake up and write the objection down on a convenient slip of paper, then, he drifted dreamily back to sleep with a smile on his face. When he awoke the next morning he read the words, ....
'THAT¹S WHAT YOU SAY!'
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The Jerry Springer Show
Philosophy
Crowd: Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!
Jerry: Today's guests are here because they can't agree on fundamental philosophical principles. I'd like to welcome Todd to the show.
[Todd enters from backstage.]
Jerry: Hello, Todd.
Todd: Hi, Jerry.
Jerry: [reading from card] So, Todd, you're here to tell your girlfriend something. What is it?
Todd: Well, Jerry, my girlfriend Ursula and I have been going out for three years now. We did everything together. We were really inseparable. But then she discovered post-Marxist political and literary theory, and it's been nothing but fighting ever since.
Jerry: Why is that?
Todd: You see, Jerry, I'm a traditional Cartesian rationalist. I believe that the individual self, the 'I' or ego is the foundation of all metaphysics. She, on the other hand, believes that the contemporary self is a socially constructed, multi-faceted subjectivity reflecting the political and economic realities of late capitalist consumerist discourse.
Crowd: Ooooohhhh!
Todd: I know! I know! Is that infantile, or what?
Jerry: So what do you want to tell her today?
Todd: I want to tell her that unless she ditches the post-modernism, we're through. I just can't go on having a relationship with a woman who doesn't believe I exist.
Jerry: Well, you're going to get your chance. Here's Ursula!
[Ursula storms onstage and charges up to Todd.]
Ursula: Patriarchal colonizer!
[She slaps him viciously. Todd leaps up, but the security guys pull them apart before things can go any further.]
Ursula: Don't listen to him! Logic is a male hysteria! Rationality equals oppression and the silencing of marginalized voices!
Todd: The classical methodology of rational dialectic is our only road to truth! Don't try to deny it!
Ursula: You and your dialectic! That's how it's been through our whole relationship, Jerry. Mindless repetition of the post-Enlightenment meta-narrative. 'You have to start with radical doubt, Ursula.' 'Post-structuralism is just classical skeptical thought re-cast in the language of semiotics, Ursula.'
Crowd: Booo! Booo!
Jerry: Well, Ursula, come on. Don't you agree that the roots of contemporary neo-Leftism simply have to be sought in Enlightenment political philosophy?
Ursula: History is the discourse of powerful centrally located voices marginalizing and de-scribing the sub-altern!
Todd: See what I have to put up with? Do you know what it's like living with someone who sees sex as a metaphoric demonstration of the anti-feminist violence implicit in the discourse of the dominant power structure? It's terrible. She just lies there and thinks of Andrea Dworkin. That's why we never do it any more.
Crowd: Wooooo!
Ursula: You liar! Why don't you tell them how you haven't been able to get it up for the past three months because you couldn't decide if your penis truly had essential Being, or was simply a manifestation of Mind?
Todd: Wait a minute! Wait a minute!
Ursula: It's true!
Jerry: Well, I don't think we're going to solve this one right away. Our next guests are Louis and Tina. And Tina has a little confession to make!
[Louis and Tina come onstage. Todd and Ursula continue bickering in the background.]
Jerry: Tina, you are ... [reads cards] ... an existentialist, is that right?
Tina: That's right, Jerry. And Louis is, too.
Jerry: And what did you want to tell Louis today?
Tina: Jerry, today I want to tell him ...
Jerry: Talk to Louis. Talk to him. [Crowd hushes.]
Tina: Louis ... I've loved you for a long time ...
Louis: I love you, too, Tina.
Tina: Louis, you know I agree with you that existence precedes essence, but ... well, I just want to tell you I've been reading Nietzsche lately, and I don't think I can agree with your egalitarian politics any more.
Crowd: Wooooo! Woooooo!
Louis: [shocked and disbelieving] Tina, this is crazy. You know that Sartre clarified all this way back in the 40s.
Tina: But he didn't take into account Nietzsche's radical critique of democratic morality, Louis. I'm sorry. I can't ignore the contradiction any longer!
Louis: You got these ideas from Victor, didn't you? Didn't you?
Tina: Don't you bring up Victor! I only turned to him when I saw you were seeing that dominatrix! I needed a real man! An Uber-man!
Louis: [sobbing] I couldn't help it. It was my burden of freedom. It was too much!
Jerry: We've got someone here who might have something to add. Bring out ... Victor!
[Victor enters. He walks up to Louis and sticks a finger in his face.]
Victor: Louis, you're a classic post-Christian intellectual. Weak to the core!
Louis: [through tears] You can kiss my Marxist ass, Reactionary Boy!
Victor: Herd animal!
Louis: Lackey!
[Louis throws a chair at Victor; they lock horns and wrestle. The crowd goes wild. After a long struggle, the security guys pry them apart.]
Jerry: Okay, okay. It's time for questions from the audience. Go ahead, sir.
Audience member: Okay, this is for Tina. Tina, I just wanna know how you can call yourself an existentialist, and still agree with Nietzsche's doctrine of the Ubermensch. Doesn't that imply a belief in intrinsic essences that is in direct contradiction with with the fundamental principles of existentialism?
Tina: No! No! It doesn't. We can be equal in potential, without being equal in eventual personal quality. It's a question of Becoming, not Being.
Audience member: That's just disguised essentialism! You're no existentialist!
Tina: I am so!
Audience member: You're no existentialist!
Tina: I am so an existentialist, bitch!
[Ursula stands and interjects.]
Ursula: What does it [bleep] matter? Existentialism is just a cover for late capitalist anti-feminism! Look at how Sartre treated Simone de Beauvoir!
[Women in the crowd cheer and stomp.]
Tina: [Bleep] you! Fat-ass Foucaultian ho!
Ursula: You only wish you were smart enough to understand Foucault, bitch!
Tina: You the bitch!
Ursula: No, you the bitch!
Tina: Whatever! Whatever!
Jerry: We'll be right back with a final thought! Stay with us!
[Commercial break for debt-consolidation loans, ITT Technical Institute, and Psychic Alliance Hotline.]
Jerry: Hi! Welcome back. I just want to thank all our guests for being here, and say that I hope you're able to work through your differences and find happiness, if indeed happiness can be extracted from the dismal miasma of warring primal hormonal impulses we call human relationships. [Turns to the camera] Well, we all think philosophy is just fun and games. Semiotics, deconstruction, Lacanian post-Freudian psychoanalysis, it all seems like good, clean fun. But when the heart gets involved, all our painfully acquired metaphysical insights go right out the window, and we're reduced to battling it out like rutting chimpanzees. It's not pretty. If you're in a relationship, and differences over the fundamental principles of your respective subjectivities are making things difficult, maybe it's time to move on. Find someone new, someone who will accept you and the way your laughably limited human intelligence chooses to codify and rationalize the chaos of existence. After all, in the absence of a clear, unquestionable revelation from God, that's all we're all doing anyway. So remember: take care of yourselves -- and each other.
Announcer: Be sure to tune in next time, when KKK strippers battle it out with transvestite omnisexual porn stars! Tomorrow on Springer!
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Tips for the Top: How to be a philosopher
Brook Sadler
Technique 1: Begin by making a spurious distinction. Befuddle the reader with your analytic wizardry. The reader will enter a logical trance, from which she will be unable to recall the initial spurious distinction and will feel strangely compelled to accept your conclusions.
Technique 2- Think of a matter of great importance to life. Reduce it unequivocally to three concepts. Enumerate them. Analyze each concept by distinguishing two independent notions in each. Continue with further analysis (preferably speculative) until you have developed a maze of distinctions that bear no resemblance to any topic of any importance to life at all. The use of logical notation at this point will evoke deep feelings of insecurity and uncertainty in the reader - use this to your advantage. Use the word reductio at least once. Conclude by congratulating yourself on having advanced our collective human understanding of a topic of great importance by making it completely unrecognisable as such.
Technique 3- (Advanced) Sit in front of a computer. Have a thesaurus nearby. Smoke up. Proceed to pronounce on anything that happens to come to mind. Use a tone that is urgent and highfalutin. Avoid the use of punctuation and use periods as infrequently as possible. French and German phrases should appear with regularity. When in doubt, make hasty references to Foucault, Heidegger, or Derrida. Take great pains not to explain what you mean. Abandon all reason.
Technique 4- Single-handedly develop your own jargon. It should include an exceedingly hard-to-follow extended metaphor of dubious relation to the topic under discussion. Persist in using the metaphor to ground your arguments. Stick to it at all costs, even if it seems to run your argument into blatant dead- ends or outrageous contradictions. To give the appearance of profundity, insert paragraph breaks at random. Then number every paragraph. (The reader will simply divine the appropriate relations between paragraphs, sub-paragraphs, and sub-sub- paragraphs.)
Technique 5- Think of a famous example from a twentieth-century philosopher. Think of a pun based on that example. (e.g., What is it like to be a rat? zit? phat?) Use the pun to develop a catchy new example of your own. Explain your example at length. Say nothing of genuine importance. By all means, do not advance philosophical discussion one iota. Conclude with more puns.
Technique 6- Respond to an article or book that you have not read. Be relentless.
Technique 7- Read an enormous mass of empirical data. Cite all of it and conclude that it is right. Overlook statistical ambiguities and incongruities. By all means, do not deign to interpret the data. Continue on like this for as long as you can (it may require stamina). The goal is to bore the reader into submission before the flood of facts. Try not to problematise anything (that only makes it harder).
Technique 8- Do some serious research. Do not rest until you have found a really obscure text. Reject this text. Continue to search until you find something truly obscure and completely unknown. In your first paragraph, state something of interest that you have discovered from reading this obscure text. Go on for many, many pages detailing the seemingly trivial and inconsequential insights of the obscure text. Repeatedly affirm what you said was interesting in the first paragraph, taking care not to expand upon what you said there. Conclude by reminding the reader that the point is so terribly obscure and so minimally interesting that if you had not written about it, no one would have.
Technique 9- Discuss a controversial and extremely interesting topic. Show great skill in handling the complexities of the topic, treating the arguments with care and subtle.
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Causes of Death for Some of the Great Philosophers
By Stiv Fleishman
Thales: Drowning
Parmenides: It wasn't anything at all
Ockham: Cut while shaving
Russell: Cut while being shaved by one who did not shave himself
Descartes: Stopped thinking
Spinoza: Substance abuse
Leibniz: Monadnucleosis
Darwin: Natural causes
Hume: Unnatural causes
Kant: Transcendental causes (although it was his own idea)
Paley: By design
Heidegger: By Dasein
Meinong: Climbing accident
Neurath: Boating accident
G.E. Moore: By his own hand, obviously
Sheffer: Stroke
Sartre: Nausea
Pascal: Became despondent after losing a wager
Wittgenstein: Tried to see if death was an experience one lived through. (Alternate: fell off a ladder)
Hegel: Collision with owl at dusk
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And unarguably The Worst Joke Ever:
Question: What do you get when you cross an aesthete with a phenomenologist?
Answer: An interior daseiner.
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~~Phunkin Phatt Phreerider~~
''monkeys do not have the 'chillest life ever.'''
- ECFS-Attitash
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