Funny Gag
A funny gag from Radio 4's The Sunday Format (1999):
I love paradoxes. And at the same time, I hate them too, of course.
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A funny gag from Radio 4's The Sunday Format (1999):
See if you can guess the philosopher from his description by his lover below?
For my part, I tend to think that the Thomistic tradition has got this pretty sewn up; cf., for example, this good (but brief) Web site.
Consider the case of Gavrilo Prinzip. He was convicted of the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He might have argued in his defence 'all I did was pull a trigger'. Such a defence would have been rightly rejected as being less than the whole story. Even saying that Prinzip killed the Archduke is less than the whole story. We want to say that he committed murder. To say that he murdered him is to say that he killed him illegally and he intended to kill (or, perhaps, cause grievous bodily harm). It is impossible to murder unintentionally. Note how the description of what he did, or what he did itself, is determined in part by his intentions. We cannot work out what he did without taking into account Prinzip's mental states.
‘It is no good saying ‘I don’t happen to be logical’. Logic is simply the architecture of human reason. If you try to base your life and hopes on logical absurdities you will go mad. […] People are going mad and talking balls to psychiatrists not because of accidents to the chamber-pot in the nursery but because there is no logical structure to their beliefs.’
Evelyn Waugh in a letter to John Betjeman