Plato and platypus epub

Perhaps not. In his first answer to the question of whether he is a real cowboy, he reasoned, 1. If someone spends all his time doing cowboy-type things, he is a real cowboy. I spend all my time doing those cowboy-type things. Therefore, I am a real cowboy. The woman reasoned, 1.

If a woman spends all her time thinking about women, she is a lesbian. I am a woman. I spend all my time thinking about women. Therefore, I am a lesbian. Okay, we never promised you that philosophy is the same as jokes. Well, maybe a duck. Some have argued that because the universe is like a clock, there must be a Clockmaker.

Why a clock anyhow? Hume asks. Why not say the universe is analogous to a kangaroo? After all, both are organically interconnected systems. A fundamental problem with arguments from analogy is the assumption that, because some aspects of A are similar to B, other aspects of A are similar to B. Another problem with arguments from analogy is that you get totally different analogies from different points of view.

Three engineering students are discussing what sort of God must have designed the human body. Look at all the joints. The nervous system has thousands of electrical connections. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area? They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met. It works! An older Jewish gentleman marries a younger lady, and they are very much in love. However, no matter what the husband does sexually, the woman never reaches orgasm.

Since a Jewish wife is entitled to sexual pleasure, they decide to ask the rabbi. While the two of you are making love, have the young man wave a towel over you. That will help the wife fantasize and should bring on an orgasm. They hire a handsome young man and he waves a towel over them as they make love. Perplexed, they go back to the rabbi. Have the young man make love to your wife and you wave the towel over them.

The young man gets into bed with the wife, and the husband waves the towel. The young man gets to work with great enthusiasm and the wife soon has an enormous, room-shaking, screaming orgasm. Drop your pants. A New York boy is being led through the swamps of Louisiana by his cousin. They may be treating it as the Monte Carlo Strategy. Actually, croupiers depend upon that. We know that a roulette wheel that has half red positions and half black positions has a 50 percent chance of stopping on red.

The wheel has exactly the same 50 percent chance of stopping on red on the seventh turn as it had on every other turn, and this would be true no matter how many blacks had come up in a row. Circular Argument A circular argument is an argument in which the evidence for a proposition contains the proposition itself. It was autumn, and the Indians on the reservation asked their new chief if it was going to be a cold winter. Raised in the ways of the modern world, the chief had never been taught the old secrets and had no way of knowing whether the winter would be cold or mild.

To be on the safe side, he advised the tribe to collect wood and be prepared for a cold winter. The meteorologist replied that, indeed, he thought the winter would be quite cold. The chief advised the tribe to stock even more wood. A couple of weeks later, the chief checked in again with the Weather Service. A couple of weeks later, the chief called the Weather Service again and asked how the winter was looking at that point.

Fortunately, he was using a circular saw. I heard you died! A man walks into a pet store and asks to see the parrots. The store owner shows him two beautiful ones out on the floor. What does he do? One day, the odd rabbi out, after losing three to one again, decided to appeal to a higher authority.

Please give me a sign to prove it to them! As soon as the rabbi finished his prayer, a storm cloud moved across the sky above the four rabbis. It rumbled once and dissolved. So the rabbi prayed again. So please, God, a bigger sign! In slightly different words, this could be the definition of a joke—at least, most of the jokes in this book. Holding two mutually contradicting ideas in our heads at the same time makes us giddy.

But most significantly, you can tell a tricky paradox at a party and get a good laugh. Have you heard his story about the race between Achilles and the tortoise? At the gun—or as they said in the fifth century b.

Of course, by then the tortoise has moved a little way. So now Achilles has to get to that spot. By the time he gets there, the tortoise has moved again. All the tortoise needs to do to win the race is to not to stop. Another was his racetrack paradox. He must run to the midpoint; then he must run to the midpoint of the remaining distance; then to the midpoint of the still remaining distance, etc.

Theoretically speaking, because he has to get to mid- points an infinite number of times, he can never get to the end of the track. But of course he does. Even Zeno can see that. Give me two of them. Running two vacuums will only cut the rug-cleaning time by three quarters; running three, by five sixths; and so on, as the number of vacuum cleaners goes on to infinity. But hang on. Still not laughing?

Does the barber shave himself? Remember these? R Dimitri: Cute. But what does any of this have to do with answering the Big Questions? Tasso: What Acropolis? Dimitri: That one! Right over there! Maybe you ought to ease off on the ouzo, pal. Tasso: But is that the Acropolis or just something that you believe is the Acropolis? For that matter, how do you know anything is real? R Reason vs.

Revelation So how do we know anything at all, if in fact we do know anything at all? A man stumbles into a deep well and plummets a hundred feet before grasping a spindly root, stopping his fall. Suddenly, the clouds part and a beam of bright light shines down on him. Let go of the root, and I will save you. This came to be known as putting Descartes before the source. Well, actually, he did believe that, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with cogito ergo sum.

He started out by doubting the existence of the external world. That was easy enough. Per- haps he was dreaming or hallucinating. Then he tried doubt- ing his own existence. But doubt as he would, he kept coming up against the fact that there was a doubter.

Must be himself! He could not doubt his own doubting. But even this lower standard demands that the jury carry out a similar—and nearly as radical—mental ex- periment as Descartes did. A defendant was on trial for murder.

There was strong evidence indicating his guilt, but there was no corpse. In his closing statement, the defense attorney resorted to a trick. The jurors, stunned, all looked eagerly. A minute passed. Nothing happened. But you all looked at the door with anticipation.

I saw all of you stare at the door. Berkeley argued that our only knowledge of this world is what comes to us through our senses. But the good bishop did go on to infer that sense data has to come from somewhere, so that some- where must be God. That kick and the sore toe that followed from it only proved that God was busy at his task of sending coordinated sense data Dr. Things get more complicated when the source of our sense data is another human being: A man is worried that his wife is losing her hearing, so he consults a doctor.

The doctor suggests that he try a simple at- home test on her: Stand behind her and ask her a question, first from twenty feet away, next from ten feet, and finally right behind her.

So the man goes home and sees his wife in the kitchen facing the stove. But it was not always so. Many philosophers in bygone eras thought that there were some innate ideas in our minds that were there a priori—or prior to experience. Some thought our ideas of God were in- nate; others claimed that our idea of causality was innate too. But most of us accept that the best evidence for the truth of a statement about the external world is sensory experience, and in that sense we are all empiricists.

That is, unless we are the King of Poland, the exception that proves the rule: The King of Poland and a retinue of dukes and earls went out for a royal elk hunt.

He said he was not an elk. Those sheep have been shorn. But we would be wrong. It is actu- ally the wife who has formulated what most scientists would consider the more scientific hypothesis.

Sci- entists use their prior experiences to calculate probabilities and to infer more general statements. From prior experience I know that farmers do not generally shear sheep only on one side and that, even if this farmer did, the probability of the sheep arranging themselves on the hillside so that only their shorn sides face the road is infinitesimal. More typically, we assume that a person who cannot extrapolate from his prior experience is simply a dingbat, or, as they say in India, a Sardar.

A New Delhi policeman is interrogating three Sardars who are training to become detectives. How would you recognize him? Is that the best answer you can come up with? The suspect does in fact wear contact lenses. Good work! How were you able to make such an astute observation?

David Hume, the skeptical British empiricist, said that the only rational basis for believing that something is a miracle is that all alternative ex- planations are even more improbable.

Say a man insists he has a potted palm that sings arias from Aida. Which is more im- probable: that the potted palm has violated the laws of nature, or that the man is crazy, or fibbing or high on mushrooms?

Since the odds of the man having been deceived or having stretched the truth are always somewhat greater than the odds of a violation of the laws of nature, Hume could foresee no circumstance in which it would be rational to conclude that a miracle had happened.

Add to this the generally known fact that potted palms prefer Puccini to Verdi. His friend suggested that he visit a swami who lived in a nearby cave. It only costs ten dollars. Soak your arm in warm water. Avoid heavy lifting. It will be better in two weeks. So Bill decided to get back at his friend.

He mixed together some tap water, a yard sample from his dog, and urine samples from his wife and son. To top it off, he included another bodily fluid of his own, and left the concoction outside the cave with ten dollars. He then called his friend and told him that he was having some other health problems and that he had left another sample for the swami. Get a water softener.

Your dog has worms. Get him vitamins. Your son is hooked on cocaine. Get him into rehab. Your wife is pregnant with twin girls. Get a lawyer. When her turn came, she went into the back room of the store and, amazingly, emerged within half an hour, walking completely erect with her head held high. What did Doc do? A blind man sits down next to him, so the Jewish guy offers him some of his lunch—a piece of matzoh.

Another guy walks into the bar with a dog. They gave me a Chihuahua?!? Like behind it somewhere. The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant thought so. He read the British empiricists, and as he put it, they awakened him from his dogmatic slumber. But the empiricists demonstrated that, because our knowledge of the external world comes to us through our senses, it is always, in a certain sense, uncertain. A strawberry is only red or sweet when it is observed through certain equipment—our eyes and our taste buds.

We know that some people with different taste buds may not experi- ence it as sweet at all. In so saying, Kant laid down the gauntlet for a paradigm shift in philosophy. Reason cannot tell us about the world be- yond our senses. Philosophy was never the same again. Urologist: Another ding an sich! Who is it? Secretary: How would I know? Urologist: Describe him. Secretary: You must be kidding!

Whatever that evidence was, it must have been phenomenal! If you follow our drift. What tipped her off? Must have been something in the realm of the senses. Maybe it was a sixth sense, maybe it was just senses one through five, but it was certainly a sense in some sense. For Kant, and for much of epistemology that followed af- ter him, the questions of what we can know and how we can know it can be analyzed in terms of what we can say meaning- fully about what we know and how we know it.

What kinds of statements about the world contain knowledge of the world? Kant went about the task of answering this question by di- viding statements into two categories: analytic and synthetic. Analytic statements are those that are true by definition.

Next, Kant distinguished between a priori and a posteriori statements. A priori statements are those we are able to make on the basis of reason alone, without recourse to sensory experience.

We simply need to look in the dictionary. A posteriori judgments, on the other hand, are based on sensory experience of the world. How so? It would be like living in the film Mulholland Drive, where events occur in no coherent order. Eat some meatballs too. Blow: Ha! Same deal. See, it pulls up the sleeve. When I bend my elbow, the collar goes halfway up the back of my head.

Raise your head up and back. Bend at the waist way over to the left and it evens out. The only way he can walk is with a herky-jerky, spastic gait.

Just then, two passersby notice him. My heart goes out to him. That suit fits him perfectly! In fact, each was simply arriving at an analytic conclusion, true by definition.

Is that an analytic statement, true by definition? Or is it synthetic? Does it provide us with new knowledge about the world? Did we come to it by counting two things and then counting two more things and then counting the whole pile?

The latter is the approach taken by the Voohoona tribe in the Australian outback. The anthropologist asks him how he knows this. First I tie two knots in a cord. Then I tie two knots in another cord. When I join the two cords together, I have five knots. Pragmatism For an epistemological pragmatist like the late-nineteenth- century American philosopher William James, the truth of a statement lies in its practical consequences.

According to James, we choose our truth by what difference it will make in practice. Your husband is five-feet-four, bald, and has a huge belly. You may have heard it yourself. Truth cannot be determined solely by epistemological criteria, because the adequacy of those criteria cannot be determined apart from the goals sought and values held. This happened in epistemology in the early twenti- eth century when the phenomenologists weighed in on what it really means to know something.

More a methodology than a set of philosophical principles, phenomenology attempts to understand human experience as it is lived rather than as ob- jective data. Bring your husband in with you. Okay, now lie down, please. Uh-huh, I see. Okay, you may put your clothes back on. Janet takes the woman aside. Tasso: Good? In what way? Dimitri: Before I answer that, I have a question for you.

It is also what keeps priests, pundits, and parents busy. Just one last question: How do you determine just principles? Dimitri: Du-uh! Just like everybody else. I learn them from my mom. But there are complications. The first is, how can we be sure what God really thinks? Fundamentalists have that one covered: Scripture says so. But how did the people in Scripture know the signals they were getting were really from God? Abraham thought he was called by God to sacrifice his son on the altar.

What exactly qualifies as honoring thy father and mother? Marrying the boring son of the family dentist, as thy honorable mother and father want you to do?

A prime characteristic of Divine Law is that God always has the last word. Moses trudges down from Mt. The good news is I got Him down to ten. But not now! The Philos- opher Kings guide the state as Reason guides the human soul. There is a flash of lightning, and the professor appears transformed, but he just sits there, staring down at the table.

They could not change much of anything in their daily lives, so they decided to change their attitude toward life itself. It was the only personal control they had left. What the Sto- ics came up with was a strategy of emotional disengagement from life. They called their attitude apathia apathy and for the Stoics apathy was a virtue, which made them a barrel of laughs at the local taverna.

The Stoics were willing to sacrifice some kinds of happiness sex, drugs, and Dionysian hip-hop in order to avoid the unhappiness brought on by their pas- sions STDs, hangovers, and bad rhymes. They acted only from reason, never from passion, and therefore considered themselves the only truly happy people—which is to say they were un-unhappy.

In the following story, Mr. Cooper demonstrates a modern form of Stoicism: Stoicism by proxy. Cooper made it clear he was in a big hurry. Just pull the tooth and get it over with. Cooper turned to his wife. For example, if a man were to shoot his mother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man. The protagonist in the following story is clearly a utili- tarian: Mrs.

The artist pointed out that would be tantamount to lying. Said Mrs. After I die, I want her to go crazy looking for the jewelry. Brevoort, a widow, was hanging out by the pool at her country club when she spotted a handsome man sunning himself. What for? In one essay, he poses a situation in which one can earn money to buy a new TV by selling a homeless child to a corporation that will har- vest his organs for transplants.

Way bad, we all agree. But then Singer argues that anytime one buys a new TV in lieu of sending money to a charity that protects homeless children, he is doing essentially the same thing. She: A million bucks? I guess I would. He: How about for two dollars? She: Get lost, buddy! What do you think I am? But there is a fundamental difference between the categori- cal imperative and the golden rule, and this one-liner hits it on the head: A sadist is a masochist who follows the golden rule. In inflicting pain on others, the masochist is only doing what the golden rule requires: doing what he would like done unto him, preferably with a whip.

Even a masochist would find that unreasonable. Thirteenth century b. Do not to others what ye do not wish done to yourself. This is the whole Dharma. Heed it well. What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor; that is the entire Torah; the rest is commentary; go learn it. Twelfth century b. Human nature is good only when it does not do unto another whatever is not good for its own self. Sixth century b. Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.

Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself. Seventh century a. No one of you is a believer until you desire for another that which you desire for yourself. Nineteenth century a. Ascribe not to any soul that which thou wouldst not have ascribed to thee, and say not that which thou doest not. This is my command unto thee, do thou observe it. He started small, by announcing the death of God. What Nietzsche meant by the death of God was that West- ern culture had outgrown metaphysical explanations of the world as well as the accompanying Christian ethic.

In place of Christian ethics he substituted a life-affirming ethic of strength, which he called the will to power. Friedrich was clearly a mem- ber of the Tony Soprano school when it came to the golden rule. Emotivism By the mid-twentieth century, most ethical philosophy was metaethical. Bioethics, feminist ethics, and ethics for the proper treatment of animals became de rigeur.

One type of applied ethics that burgeoned in the twentieth century was professional ethics, the codes regulating the rela- tionships of professionals to clients and patients. After attending a conference on professional ethics, four psychiatrists walked out together. Four docs went on a duck-hunting trip together: a family practitioner, a gynecologist, a surgeon, and a pathologist.

It should come as no surprise that clergy also have profes- sional ethics or that theirs come with divine sanctions. The young rabbi was an avid golfer. Even on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, he snuck out by himself for a quick nine holes.

On the last hole he teed off, and a gust of wind carried his ball directly over the hole and dropped it in for a hole in one. This is a punishment? My kids as opposed to myself? My country as opposed to humanity? The following question, Cohen recently wrote on slate. We are, after all, a family.

No matter how hard we try to bring our lives under rational control, as the moral philosophers would have us do, our unconscious is always breaking through. I made a terrible Freudian slip. You ruined my life! You call that a breakfast? He gathers it up, stuffs it in his pocket, rushes outside and hails a cab, telling the driver to get him to the emergency room fast. Give it to me.

Who are the people affected? How will the outcome influence future situations? In a case of infidelity, for example, situation ethicists would want to know, among other things, about the status of the marriage. They might end up on different sides of the issue depending on whether the marriage was already effectively over.

Opponents of situ- ation ethics voiced their outrage, sensing that such reasoning might be used to justify anything a person wanted to do. Some of these opponents took an absolutist position: Infidelity is always wrong, regardless of the circumstances. Paradoxically, however, it is sometimes by ignoring the specifics of the situation that we create the opportunity for self-serving action.

Armed robbers burst into a bank, line up customers and staff against the wall, and begin to take their wallets, watches, and jewelry. The first accountant suddenly thrusts something in the hand of the other. Tasso: Like Zeus and Apollo. Or my personal favorite, Aphrodite. Tasso: One of my favorites too. Dimitri: If she exists? You better watch your mouth, Tasso. Dimitri: In what way?

Tasso: He makes you think the voices in your head are real. The agnostic is one step short of an atheist, who considers the case against the existence of God closed. So these two Irish drinking buddies are in the pub when they see a bald guy drinking alone at the end of the bar. Sean: Nah. Take a good look. Atheists are another story. The book has been awarded with , and many others. Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator.

We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed.

Published in the book become immediate popular and critical acclaim in philosophy, non fiction books. Is an irreverent crash course through the great thinkers and traditions. Philosophy for those who like to take the heavy stuff lightly, this is a joy to read—and finally, it all makes sense! Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar. PDF is available on our online library.

Or any type of ebook, for any type of product. Anecdotes, irreverent humor and a few bar jokes will keep you laughing all the way through this intro to philosophy.