Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [147]
8. While related to bullshit, the idea of deluding oneself with what one wants to be true is closer to the concept of “truthiness” now popularized by satirist Stephen Colbert. For several papers addressing the concept, including my own “Truth, Truthiness and Bullshit for the American Voter,” see Stephen Colbert and Philosophy, ed. Aaron Schiller (Chicago: Open Court, 2009).
9. Harry G. Frankfurt, On Truth (New York: Knopf, 2006), 99–101.
Chapter 5
1. Charles Sanders Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 10.
2. Peirce, Philosophical Writings, 28.
Chapter 6
1. Yes, yes. There are real catfish and real dogfish swimming around in our world, but these hardly resemble the Seussian creatures that share their names.
2. Plato, Theaetetus 201d–210a.
3. See for instance, what has come to be known as “the Gettier problem,” a counterexample to the claim that knowledge is merely justified true belief, in Edmund Gettier’s “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” in Analysis, v. 23 (1963), 121–23.
4. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 70.
5. Including, presumably, the claim that global skepticism is true!
6. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.viii.10 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 135.
7. Marco is also the protagonist of Dr. Seuss’s And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.
8. George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982), 30.
9. Berkeley suggests that this uniformity exists because the universe is held together by God’s continuous, perfect perceiving. While consistent with epistemological idealism, introducing a supernatural being probably requires even more of an explanation than what its introduction is intended to explain.
10. From the Latin meaning “from the one before.”
11. From the Latin meaning “from the one after.”
12. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method in Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 127.
13. The analytic-synthetic distinction has been a focus of many philosophers and schools of thought, most notably in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and more recently in the work of the Logical Positivists. Others have rejected the distinction as untenable; see for instance W. V. O. Quine’s 1951 essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.”
14. Robin May Schott, Discovering Feminist Philosophy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 56.
15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965), 93 [A 51/B 75].
16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 255–56.
17. Jalal al-Din Rumi, Tales from Masnavi, trans. A. J. Arberry #71. Retrieved from www.khamush.com/tales_from_masnavi.htm#The%20Elephant (August 1, 2010).
18. W. V. O. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 69.
Chapter 7
1. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv.
2. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 81.
3. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiii.
4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 635 [A805/B833].
5. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 29, xxx.
6. You now know more about Kant than 99.9 percent of the population including, unfortunately, my students.
7. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 301.
8. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
9. Jean-François Lyotard