Blog Schmog
By Jon Cogburn (apologies to Delmore Schwarz, in the hope that he is still with us) Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? – William S. Burroughs The stupid car that drags me round,A manifold breathing to spark the gas,Crummy and rattling here and there,Barely makes the […]
By Jon Cogburn Professional wrestling fans measure one another's level of sophistication in terms of the extent to which they are able to differentiate the wrestler-qua-character from the wrestler-qua-performer. So-called "smart marks" cherish the performers who play convincing heels. This being said, wrestling is interesting in part because smart marks by common agreement have a […]
By Jon Cogburn Larry David doing Bernie Sanders is just head and shoulders above everyone else on the stage. The most brilliant part is how seamlessly he weaves in typical bits of Larry David type kvetching that Sanders wouldn't really engage in. It's a wonderful bit of ambiguity on David's part: on the one hand […]
By Jon Cogburn The three weirdest things that major league philosophy professors do when talking to those of us playing in the minors (MiLP, consisting of all of triple, double, class, etc. etc. etc. A departments)- Refer to colleagues and/or their major league graduate school teachers by first name, as if we automatically know who […]
By Jon Cogburn In “The Providential Advantage of Divine Foreknowledge” (in Kevin Timpe, ed., Arguing About Religion, Routledge, 2009) David P. Hunt motivates his claim that God's knowledge of all future contingencies is not inconsistent with God's ability to intervene in nature by presenting a simple schema. Where "E" is some event, K(E) is God […]
Anyone neither ignorant nor lacking a good will knows the extent to which Commonwealth defamation law threatens free speech. Philosophers first became widely aware of this with Geoffrey Pullum's infamous discussion of "fuck Lyndon Johnson" sample sentences in The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. Linguistics textbooks were actually censored in Great Britain because of the fact […]
By Anonymous Guest Poster [This is our first anonymous guest post. Every teacher has to deal with well-meaning relatives saying things like, "well it must be nice to have summer off." The truth is, we don't get summer off, and many of us work harder in the summer than we do during the school year. […]
By Jon Cogburn Analytic philosophers easily divide into two camps, the majority of those who, with Thomas Ricketts,* find W.V.O. Quine "an enormous pleasure to read" and the minority of us who find such judgments to be an enormous embarrassment. To the extent that a perhaps apocryphal, yet widespread, story is true, those of us […]
By Jon Cogburn The funniest moment in the history of philosophy is probably Immanuel Kant getting revenge on a Lutheran Choir down the street via a weird footnote. Those who have recommended the singing of spiritual songs as part of the domestic rites of worship have not considered that by means of such a noisy […]
By Jon Cogburn Just as the back to school interregnum has slowed things to a crawl around here, dailynous is abuzz with discussion of the pros and cons of invitation only conferences (also see Eric Schliesser's fine discussion here). A couple of things were really, really odd to me about the discussion. First, nobody mentioned […]