If you, like me, are a professional philosopher, sometimes it seems like you have to talk about the whole Descartes thing … well, sometimes it seems like you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting yourself giving a lecture about how maybe there’s an Deceiving Demon messing with you to a considerable extent.
Now: probably you don’t have good art skills, so you just draw a circle on the board and announce to the students, with confidence that brooks no demurral, ‘this is YOU’. (Or, rather, your MIND.)
Students [collective Troy McClure imitation]: It’s like he’s known me all my life!
You [blushing modestly]: Well, I do have a Ph.D.
But suppose your students still insist that they don’t get it about the whole Deceiving Demon thing. Well, with this one-size fits-all graphic, you can explain 53% of all known epistemological problems. I give you: Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen’s Brain In A Jar!
hat tip: ISB
Those are some clear and distinct shorts he’s wearing, if I do say so myself.
TOMORROW: Hawkman explains the Treaty of Versailles.
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Matt 04.14.07 at 4:21 pm
Those shorts may be clear but I’m not so sure they are distinct- I suspect that braniac-5 (judging by the green legs) is actually wearing a singlet of some sort and the belt just makes it look like he’s got on shorts.
derek 04.14.07 at 4:25 pm
Hasn’t The Matrix now got this issue across to the entire movie-going public?
swampcracker 04.14.07 at 4:53 pm
I was half expecting: “This is your brain [the one in the jar], and this is your brain on epistemology [one size fits all]. Furthermore, is there a spacial relationship between the brain in the jar and it’s proximity to the bulge in the pants? As in: “I think, therefore I am _______ [fill in the blank].”
swampcracker 04.14.07 at 4:55 pm
Or how about epistemology in a Chinese restaurant: “Cogito ergo dim sum.”
John Holbo 04.14.07 at 5:00 pm
In all seriousness: thanks to the Matrix, there is no longer any trouble whatsoever, if ever there was. I just needed a hook for the post.
c.l. ball 04.14.07 at 5:02 pm
Hasn’t The Matrix now got this issue across to the entire movie-going public?
So that’s where Descartes got it from.
And thanks for waiting to post the Versailles explanation to the end of the semester, where it does me no good for lecture.
Now if you have a globalization before next Tues., I’ll owe you a Coke.
Kelly 04.14.07 at 5:11 pm
TOMORROW: Hawkman explains the Treaty of Versailles.
Oh please? You have no idea how much this would make me look forward to tomorrow!
John Holbo 04.14.07 at 5:15 pm
Kelly, keep looking forward. I wasn’t kidding about that part. I’m gonna do it. I swear to you.
Lenny Bailes 04.14.07 at 5:20 pm
After Hawkman attempts to justify the conditions imposed upon Germany by the Allied Powers, you’re going to want Green Arrow in there to rebut his ass.
Lee A. Arnold 04.14.07 at 5:24 pm
“I sink halfway, therefore I am.”
Adam Kotsko 04.14.07 at 6:02 pm
Re: the circle — if I’m remembering right, according to Gregory of Nyssa (or his sister), the post-resurrection body will be spherical. Your students were therefore responding out of their deepest, though unarticulated, eschatological hopes.
Patrick S. O'Donnell 04.14.07 at 6:13 pm
And yet the brain is not the mind, nor the mind a person.
Patrick S. O'Donnell 04.14.07 at 6:14 pm
That is, in case anyone was laboring under demonic-like self-deception.
Robin 04.14.07 at 6:57 pm
Now I understand why Hilary Putnam use to wear that Braniac t-shirt!!!! The evil scientist at the beginning of Reason, Truth and History: Braniac!
Lee A. Arnold 04.14.07 at 7:18 pm
Alfred Jarry reports that after he died, Dr. Faustroll, “finding his soul to be abstract and naked, donned the realm of the unknown dimension.” Then, in his postmortem letter to Lord Kelvin, Faustroll writes that God’s name is not Jack, but that He is the shortest distance between zero and infinity, in either direction. “But God being without dimension is not a line. […] Therefore, definitively: GOD IS THE TANGENTIAL POINT BETWEEN ZERO AND INFINITY. Pataphysics is the science…” (from: Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician — Simon Taylor Watson, translator.)
This is very hard to argue with… So, if Gregory of Nyssa or his sister claimed that the post-resurrection body is a sphere, I would tend to go with that, (one way or the other I guess,) but as Nicholas of Cusa might have pointed-out, a sphere with infinite radius is a plane, while a sphere with zero radius is… well, I don’t know what exactly… but it looks like the existence of eschatological hope proves that YOU, contra Cantor, are a denumerable continuum.
Patrick S. O'Donnell 04.14.07 at 7:23 pm
I would have thought the post-resurrection body would rather resemble the pineal gland.
Walt 04.14.07 at 7:33 pm
You better deliver on that Hawkman/Versailles promise, or I’m totally going over to the Theory side.
swampcracker 04.14.07 at 8:45 pm
“sphere with zero radius is” is a singularity
Ignacio Prado 04.14.07 at 10:13 pm
re: “Gregory of Nyssa (or his sister)”
Gregoria ist Nice?
Jimmy Olsen's brain 04.14.07 at 10:22 pm
As a celebrity brain in a jar, let me just say: I envy the dead.
eleanor 04.14.07 at 10:39 pm
Cogito ergo sum geek.
Tom Scudder 04.15.07 at 12:36 am
according to Gregory of Nyssa (or his sister), the post-resurrection body will be spherical.
“Consider a spherical parousia“
Kip W 04.15.07 at 1:43 am
It just needs a bullet hole in the jar, plugged with a piece of bubble gum.
“Knock knock…”
George 04.15.07 at 10:06 am
This is very hard to argue with… So, if Gregory of Nyssa or his sister claimed that the post-resurrection body is a sphere, I would tend to go with that, removals (one way or the other I guess,) but as Nicholas of Cusa might have pointed-out, a sphere with infinite radius is a plane, while a sphere with zero radius is… well, I don’t know what exactly… but it looks like the existence of eschatological hope proves that YOU, contra Cantor, are a denumerable continuum.
Hermenauta 04.15.07 at 12:29 pm
I’m deeply disappointed by your lack of understandment. Since it is patently clear from the picture that Bushniacs have progressed one step further than waterboarding, into the even more wetted realm of brainwashing.
Lee A. Arnold 04.15.07 at 6:48 pm
George, if you make money off of that, you owe me some.
Glorious Godfrey 04.16.07 at 9:41 am
For the uninitiated, Kip w is making an awesome reference to an issue of “Doom patrol”, a comic written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Richard Case. It has brains in jars and Cartesian piss-taking aplenty and is a riot, but it is more concerned with mind-body dualism than with Deceiving Daemons.
Which is apposite. Olsen’s vat is NOT outfitted with 3D-GOGGLES ! ! !
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