causes of death of philosophers- T, U, V, W, Z

Tanner: Götterdammerung
Tarski: 'Death'
Taylor: Renounced agency
Thales: Drowned
Thoreau: Uncivil disobedience
Tillich: Being underground
Tuomela: Group decision
Turing: Failed his own test

Unamuno, Miguel: Tragic loss of sense
Unger: Never knew

Van Fraassen: Empirical inadequacy
Van Inwagen: Own free will
Vico: Recycled
Virilio: Tachycardia
Von Mises, Richard: Collective causes
Von Wright: By obligation

Wagner: Götterdämmerung
Walton: Make-believe
Warburton: Went back to basics
Weber: Overwork
Wheeler: Manifold causes
Whitehead: Procession
Wiggins: Substantial change
Williams: Bored with immortality
Winch: Witchcraft
Wisdom: Other minds
Wittgenstein: Became the late Wittgenstein
Wolf: Sanctified
Worrall: Destructured
Wright: Objectified

Zeno: Run over by tortoise

causes of death of philosophers- Q, R, S

Quine: Over-stimulation

Rand, Ayn: Objectified ego
Ramsey: Made redundant
Rawls: Ignorance unveiled
Raz: Exclusionary reasons
Redhead: Robust causes
Reichenbach: Common causes
Reid: Uncommon sense
Rescher: Incoherence
Ricoeur: Felt misunderstood
Rorty: No foundations
Ross: In the line of duty
Rousseau: Contract job
Russell: Cut himself shaving
Ryle: Gave up the ghost

Salmon: Fishy causal process Sartre: Nothing doing Scanlon: Passed the buck Schaffer, J: Pre-empted Scheffler, Samuel: Exercised his prerogative Scheler: Became objectively valued Schelling: Became too idealistic Schlesinger: Became hypertensed Schlick: Collapsed protocol Schopenhauer: Willing to die Searle: Chinese food Sellars: Not given Sextus Empiricus: Doubtful causes Sheffer: Stroke Shoemaker: Loss of identity Sidgwick: Impractical reason Simons: Departed Singer: Liberated Skinner, B F: Bad behaviour Skolem: Ambiguity Slote: Had enough Smart: Dematerialised Smith, A: Invisible hand Smith, M: Lost motivation Smith, P: Unanalysed Socrates: Consumption Sorabji: Four causes Spengler: Decline Sperber: Became irrelevant Spinoza: Substance abuse Stalnaker: Inquiry pending Steglich-Petersen: Lost his norms Stocker: Existence became supererogatory Strawson: Unidentified Sylvan: Lost in jungle

causes of death of philosophers- N, O, P

Naess: Over-exposure at great height
Nagel, Ernest: Reduction
Nagel, Tom: Struck by bat
Nerlich: Spaced out
Neurath: Positive causes
Newcomb: Too boxed
Newton: Fluxions
Nietzsche: Overpowered himself
Noonan: Unidentified assailant
Nozick: Lost track

O'Shaughnessy: Lost the will
Oakeshott: Experienced arrest
Ockham: Shaved beyond necessity
Oddie: Flew too close to the truth
Ortega y Gasset: Learned ignoramus

Paine: Lost his rights
Paley: Bad design
Papineau: Supernaturalised
Paracelsus: Stabbed
Parfit: Mistaken identity
Parmenides: No two ways
Pascal: The wagers of sin
Passmore: 100 years of philosophy
Pavlov: Reflexed
Peacocke: Discontent
Peirce: Reached the end of inquiry
Penrose: Became computable
Perry: Lost himself
Pettit: Stopped responding
Pherecydes: Lice
Piaget: Irreversible operation
Pirsig: Motorbike crashed
Place: Brained
Plantinga: Of necessity
Plato: Caved in
Pollock: Defeated
Popper: Falsified
Price: Backward causes
Priest: Became more dead than alive
Prior: Past it
Pritchard: Bad luck
Protagoras: Eaten by fish
Putnam: Dysfunctional state
Pyrrho: Scepticemia
Pythagoras: Squared on the hypotenuse

causes of death of philosophers- M

Mach: Unsensational causes
Machiavelli: Intriguing causes
MacIntyre: After-virtue infection
Mackie: An inus condition
Maimonides: Lost his guide
Malcolm: Undreamed of causes
Malebranche: Occasional causes
Malley: Ceased to subsist
Marcuse: Became multi-dimensional
Maritain: Connatural causes
Martin, C B: Lockejaw
Marx: Material causes
Matravers: Art attack
Maxwell: Demonic possession
McCall: Branch fell off
McCulloch: Went out of his head
McDowell: Left the space of reasons
McGinn: Case closed
McTaggart: Untimely causes
Meinong: Lack of subsistence
Mellor: Killed time
Merleau-Ponty: Perceptions blacked out
Mill: Depsychologised
Millikan: Devolved
Montague: Disfunction
Montaigne: Misjudged causes
Moore: By his own hand, obviously
Mumford: Outlawed

causes of death of philosophers- J, K, and L

Jackson: Saw red
James, W: The will to leave
Jaspers: Essence exhausted
Jeffrey: Indecision
Johnson, S: Kicked the bucket
Joseph: Stebbing

Kamm, Frances: Hit by a trolley
Kamp: Ran out of time
Kant: Found the means to his own end
Kaplan: dthat
Katz: Decomposed
Ketland: Insubstantiated
Keynes: The long run
Kierkegaard: Sick to death
Kim: Supervened on nothing
Kitcher: Vaulting
Korsgaard: Kant tell
Koslow: Structural failure
Kripke: Dropped causal chain
Kuhn: Paradigm lost
Kyburg: Low frequency

akatos: Degenerated
La Mettrie: Machination
Langer: Ran out of new keys
Laozi: Attained utmost vacuity
Laplace: Prior arrangement
Laudan: Progressive debility
Le Catt, Bruce: Curiosity
Leibniz: Monadnucleosis
Lesniewski: De-parted
Levi: Contracted corpus
Levinas: Merged with others
Levi-Strauss: Eaten by natives
Lewis, C I: No more givens
Lewis, D: Joined his counterparts
Lewy: Outfoxed
Lipton: Unexplained
Locke: No idea
Lovejoy: Being unchained
Lloyd: Loss of bodily humours
Lucretius: Bumped off
Luther: Diet of worms
Lyotard: Post post-modernism

causes of death of philosophers- G and H

Gadamer: Lost horizons
Galbraith: Overpriced
Galen: Lost his sense of humours
Galileo: Stopped moving
Geach: Reference failure
Gentzen: Unnatural deduction
Gettier: Fatal counter-example
Gewirth: Dialectical necessity
Gibbon: Scribbling
Glymour: Tripped over his own bootstraps
Gödel: Became incomplete
Goldman: Unknown internal causes
Goodman: Gruesome bleen infection
Gorgias: Annihilated
Green: Had to share humanity's common end
Grice: Non-natural
Grosseteste: Encephalitis
Grunbaum: Psyched out
Gupta: Became unstable

Haack: Crossed out
Habermas: A discourse condition
Hacker: Lost his Witts
Hamilton: Crushed by mill
Han Feizi: Made illegal
Hare: Wrong prescription
Hart: No longer recognised
Hartshorne: Creatively synthesized
Haugeland: Entered excluded zone
Hayek: Serfdom
Heal: Dissimulation
Hegel: Gave up the Geist
Heidegger: Not being in time
Heisenberg: Uncertain causes
Hempel: Explained away
Heraclitus: Fell in the same river twice
Hilbert: Informal causes
Hinckfuss: Fit of morality
Hintikka: Lost his normal forms
Hobbes: Nasty causes
Hobhouse: Stopped developing
Hofstadter: Holistic trap
Honderich: Undetermined
Horwich: Deflated
Horstmann: Anthropopetal collapse
Hume: Committed to the flames
Husserl: Phenomenally bad luck
Huxley: Rabies

causes of death of philosophers- E and F

Earman: Inextendible world-line
Einstein: Diced with God
Eliot: Eructation of unhealthy souls
Emmet: Passage of nature
Empedocles: Cosmic cycle accident
Epictetus: Crime of passion
Epicurus: Nothing to worry about
Ewing: Unfitness

Feigl: Nomological dangler
Feuerbach: Unfeeling causes
Feyerabend: Everything went
Fichte: Non-ego takeover
Field: Weight of numbers
Fine: Natural ontological causes
Fischer: Incompatibility
Flew: Met the great equaliser
Fodor: Fell off Granny's knee
Follesdal: Noematheosis
Foot: Run over by a trolley
Foucault: Disempowered
Frankfurt: Revised his will
Frege: Fell under a concept
Freud: Slipped
Fukuyama: History restarted

causes of death of philosophers- D

Dancy: No particular reason
Danto: Artfully transfigured
Darwin: Became unfit
Davidson: Radically different schematosis
Dawkins: Suicidal genes
Deleuze: Deterritorialized
Democritus: Atomised
Dennett: Unintentional stance
Derrida: Deconstructed
Descartes: Stopped thinking
Devitt: Naturalised causes
Devlin: Fell off Clapham omnibus
Dewey: Became part of the environment
Diderot: Unenlightened causes
Dilthey: Hermeneutic complication
Dingler: Unsuccessful experiments
Diodorus: Mastered by the argument
Diogenes: Exposure
Dretske: No indications
Dreyfus: Computerised
Dudman: Conditional causes
Dummett: Unverifiable causes
Duns Scotus: Being univocal to an accident
Dupre: Disorder
Durkheim: Suicide
Dworkin: Lost his integrity

causes of death of philosophers- C

Calvin: Predestined
Campbell, K: Epiphenomenal causes
Camus: Found exit
Cantor: Set aside
Carnap: Left the material mode
Cartwright, Nancy: Incapacitated
Cartwright, Richard: Satisfied negative existential
Cassirer: Symbolic causes
Castaneda: Indexical self-disguise
Cato the Elder: Delendus
Cavell: Unacknowledgement
Chalmers: Too hard a problem
Chisholm: Lost his foundations
Chomsky: Degenerative transformation
Church: Recursive causes
Churchland(s): Eliminated
Cicero: Indecision
Coady: No telling
Cohen, G: Missed the marks
Colburn: Heteronomy
Collingwood: Entered history
Comte: Went negative
Condorcet: Improbable jury
Confucius: Lost his way
Copernicus: Revolution
Cournot: Became too improbable
Craig, E: Work of God
Crane: Lost his representations
Cresswell: Outmoded

causes of death of philosophers- B

Bacon, F: Hit by idol in market place
Bach, Kent: Ceased to be the only bearer of his name
Bacon, J: De trope
Barwise: Bad situation
Belnap: Became irrelevant
Benacerraf: Number was up
Bennett: Taking the consequences
Bentham: Fell off his stilts
Bergson: Elan mortel
Berkeley: Divine neglect
Berlin: Encountered one big thing
Bird: Birdlime (unnatural kind)
Bishop: Translation
Blanshard: End necessitated by system
Blackburn: Stopped projecting
Block: Trouble with bodily function
Boole: Became inverted
Bosanquet: Unqualified judgment
Bradley: Absolutely everything
Brandom: Made implicit
Bratman: As planned
Brown, Harvey: Suffocation
Burge: Something like arthritis
Buridan: Asinine starvation
Buber: Unfortunate encounter
Burke: Sublimated

causes of death of philosophers- A

Abelard: Nun Acton: Corrupt causes Adler: Inferiority complex Adorno: Bad frankfurter Albert: Undermind Altham: Logical pluracy Althusser: Became history without a subject Anaxagoras: Burned up Anaximander: Infinite causes Anaximenes: Evaporated Anscombe: By intention Anselm: Than which no deadlier can be conceived Arendt: The human condition Arnold: Drowned on Dover beach Aquinas: Last causes Aristotle: Excessive moderation Armstrong: Indisposed Arrow: Voted out Audi: Durch Technik Augustine: Hippo Austin: Executionary act Ayer: Unverifiable

Pragmatism, round two, On Mercer's Campus.

In light of an early post about pragmatism, I thought that this may drive home how important the distinction is between valuing the practical and valuing culture or spirit or some other thing that does not necessarily have a practical benefit.

“At Mercer, everyone majors in changing the world. Be the bear.”

This quote was taken from the front page of the Mercer web page and it prompted me to write about my opinion and furthermore put forward a problem as I see it. Before doing so, I would like to briefly recount something that happened to me yesterday which I hope will work as an illustration as to why I challenge whether or not this is truly the opinion of all individuals that are a part of the Mercer faculty. As many of you know, a costly statue was recently erected outside of the University Center. Yesterday, as I was walking up to the UC, I saw a fellow student of mine and made a comment along the lines of, “yeah, because we don’t know how to embody the bear without tens of thousands of dollars spent on a nine and half foot tall statue of one.” It just so happened that I was overheard by a Mercer faculty member who pointed out to me that it was not my tuition that was being spent and I therefore had no right to complain. I, of course, (and for any of you who know me this will not surprise you) argued back. I said that I think that such superfluous spending on a statue is not what we need, what we need are improvements that will help the students; he, of course, retorted and the argument went on. The point of what I think, however, is not that “school spirit” is not to be valued, but that we should be spending money where we truly need it. Even though I consider myself a philosopher of many schools, I am sometimes feel as though I am a pragmatist at heart. Do something practical and worthwhile (save and better the quality of the lives of those around us), that is how I believe we should change the world. However, as it appears, there are some who disagree; there are some that would accept money that is drastically needed in other areas of our school in these hard economic times (especially with many of our departments in the financial state that they are in), to build a 75,000 dollar bear statue that serves no practical good. My answer is, sure, it was not my tuition, but it was still money for my school, our school, and it frustrates me that such a wonderful place of learning would accept money for something as unnecessary and useless as a bear statue of such a great cost. I wonder if such reasoning, that spending great amounts of money on something that does not serve the purpose of helping others, whether here at mercer or around the world, is truly the way in which we can make a difference. I am not saying that there are not many wonderful programs at Mercer that do help to change the world, I am simply raising the question of whether or not such a mindset of some within our school does not further translate into the mindsets of students that will one day go out and engage the world. Are those who had any hand erecting that statue implying, as it seems to me, that excessive spending on impractical things is not only to be valued, but to be done at the expense of worthwhile endeavors? Is this truly the mindset that we students should have as we attempt to go out and “change the world?”

Which Should Come First, Pragmatism or the Respect of a Culture

Earlier this semester, I went to the Dominican Republic on a mission trip; it was not with one of the many Mercer on Mission trips, but lets just assume that it was. We were able to be apart of a church called The Church of the Reconciliation. This was an interesting experience for me both in experiencing a place where there was only one person who spoke both Spanish and English (and he had merely taken a few college courses; which made the language barrier extremely difficult to get through) and a culture that felt quite foreign from my own. It is the latter which still interests me long after I have returned. First, I need to briefly describe what occurred in order for my quandary to fully present itself.

While we we in the DR, we were not part of a large organization that goes their year after year. For, although we were apart of a mission sponsored by the Episcopal Church, it was not like Habitat or many of the other organizations where one would be apart of a group with a number that would be responsible for putting up the wooden planks around a room. We were there with a set amount of money, and helping people in mind. What was planned for the money and us then was entirely the doing of the locals. Keeping this in mind, what we did do was put up several walls on several houses and a bathroom, as well as fixing up the church, which was under construction. Rather than money and time and effort being put into one project, or one families home, it was spread across many projects and many homes. However, at the end of the time that we spent there, all our labor and funds had not completed a single roof or whole structure. This is the aspect that has bothered me ever since.

The philosophical school of pragmatism states (at least this is my interpretation of it) that the value of something is dependent on its practical use. The more that I think about it, the more I agree with this standpoint. It will come of no great surprise then that what frustrated me about my DR trip was that not one single family is now protected from the rain, even though we spent a great amount of time and money attempting to aid them. It was later pointed out to me that when in other countries, one should respect their culture and the way in which they do things; this, of course, means that one cannot always be a pragmatist. However, I wonder if it is better to “respect the culture” of a group of people to which you are attempting to provide aid, or to be pragmatic and help as many people as you can.

The DIvine In Every Day Life

Earlier in the semester, a lecture was put on to kick off the putting up of a collection of historical artifacts in Jack Tarver Library; the exhibit is fro the collection of Yulssus Lynn Holmes, and is still up in the library. The objects put on display brought to mind within me two philosophical questions: what is the dead owed, and what place does/should religion hold in everyday life?

The first of these questions comes about due to the nature of many of the artifacts: for many of them were figurines, statues, and lamps that were found in Egyptian and near eastern tombs. It got me thinking how people of old would honor their dead. In extreme cases they would build huge monuments as places of remembrance for those who died, but on a mundane level they would place many objects within one’s tomb, in some cases as a sign of having wealth in the life to come. Based on the collector’s lecture, the dead played a much more significant role in the life of the living four thousand years ago than it does today. I wonder why that is: is it merely that we are more irreverent, or do we value this life greater than some other or afterlife? I think that it is the latter. People seem to me to live their lives as though this is the climax of our existence and we should therefore not care about dying or the dead and merely focus on the here and now. Montaigne, however, has a different view: he posits that philosophy is the art of dying, and that death should constantly be on our minds. The ancients obviously thought that some part of this was true, but I doubt that those of us in the twenty-first century live our lives in such a way that we “practice the art of dying.”

The second question that came to mind from this lecture was that of religion in everyday life: for while death does not seem to be prominent, religion certainly has not gone out of daily life. The lecturer pointed out that the ancient Egyptians and such cultures would print the images of gods on their money, religious symbols as rings and jewelry, and having statues or figurines of gods which were kept around the house or in one’s pocket. He spelled out exactly how each of these has a parallel in modern life. This made me wonder if such things truly should occupy so much of our everyday life; is “God” something to be put on money and in pledges and on T-shirts and jewelry, or should God be a more quiet and inwardly spiritual thing, rather than an exterior sign. Or perhaps it is both.

If you are interested in the exhibit, it is located in the JT library; also, here is a link to the online exhibit,

http://libraries.mercer.edu/repository/handle/123456789/95

"The Invention of Lying"

There is this movie called The Invention of Lying in which everyone in the world constantly tells the truth. The word 'lie' does not exist nor does anyone have an understanding of what a lie is. Well, just as you must have an up to have a down, you must have a lie to have the truth. To clarify, just as the world has no understanding of a lie, they also have no understanding of the truth. However, one day this man went into the bank to withdraw all of his money from his account, and the bank's system was down. So, the bank teller asks the man how much money was in his account, so she could withdraw it out for me. She explains that she can't access his account because the system is still down, so he would just have to tell her. Suddenly, something strange happens. The man develops the idea to tell the lady that there is more money in the account than it actual is, and he does. This is a strange thing that the man has just done, and he is unable to explain it. Exactly when he tells the lady how much he wants to withdraw, the bank's system comes back up, and the lady notices that the amount of money that the man asked for was not present in his account. The lady informs the man of this problem and apologizes for the bank's mistake (which wasn't the bank's mistake at all), and the teller withdraws the amount of money that the man originally asked for because, again, everybody tells the truth, so she did not even begin to understand that the man was telling the first lie in the world. Now, the man continues to lie and fabricates a story about a man in the sky that controls the universe. The entire world is in 'aw' about this man in the sky and wants to know more. Well, of course the lies that the man tells are parallel to christianity, and everyone listens and obeys these supposed lies.

Now, Montaigne claims that society should only live their lives through truth and reality. Imagine if we lived in a world like in The Invention of Lying. Would the world be a better place and stress-free, or would it be a painful world to live in because people are constantly revealing their 'true' feelings towards one another, which can lead to comments like 'you're fat,' 'you're ugly,' or 'I hate you?'

The Power of Will (Metaphysics)

In my communication class, we watched a film called In America. The film features a family from Ireland who has lost a sense of themselves and strive to regain that sense by starting a new life in America. Each member of the family deals with his/her own personal internal struggles; however, each of them share a commonness of lost due to the death of a family member (the 4 year old son). This film provides an insight inside the world of myth. It captures a sense of what it means to believe in something, not just faintly but wholeheartedly until it classifies as being sacred. The family went through many toils. The parents had difficulties providing for their two daughters, but they did the best they could in hopes that everything would soon workout for the best.

Johnny Sullivan, the father of the family, exemplifies a man who has died in the inside. He lives his life as a ghost, or a walking zombie. This is a result of the inability to sufficiently provide for his family’s needs and the guilt he feels from the death of his son, Frankie. However, Mateo, a fellow resident in the family’s apartment building and soon to be friend, resurrects Johnny from his dead state and helps him to open his eyes. Mateo aides Johnny in finding physical courage, in which is not the “assertion of egocentric power” but “a valuing of the body as the means of empathy with others, as expression of the self as a thing of beauty and as a rich source of pleasure” (Rollo May). One’s self ceases to experience condemnation, and gains the pleasures of respectable pride.

Where does this will inside of us come from to help us keep going? Out of all the many ups and downs that the human body...the human soul endures, why haven't we just given up? There has to be something outside of us; something more powerful than us that keeps us moving because I'm almost sure that if we had our own choice we would just simply give up on life. I do believe that a friend or family member can help motivate a person to keep going, but the will to actually make such a decision derives from somewhere beyond us.

Philosophy of Music

I had to the pleasure of attending a Cello recital last Friday; it was breathtakingly perfect. The recital was daring; the musician tackled all the three b’s (Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms) of classical music. She made it all seem effortless and yet I felt every note she played. For the first time of my life I thought of music as a philosophy. We spend an outlandish amount of time trying to understand the thoughts of Plato, the sayings of Aristotle, even the ethics behind Machiavelli’s the prince… But what is it about instrumental music? It is as puzzling as all the rest, and in many ways more mysterious. It is a sound that evokes a different emotion in most. It adds to the mysteries of our character and explains just how different we all are. “The sound of music” I am excitingly baffled because never did I think music could be more than just that. Is it even possible that music could unbalance Socrates Kallipolis because of the emotions it may convey?

Laws for Men, Laws for Gods

First off-wow, it's been a while. Stupid turkey-based holidays.

Second--Socrates. Am I as tired of talking about this guy as you guys are hearing about him? I just got finished (and by “just finished,” I of course mean “within plenty of time for class”) reading the section in The Politics regarding laws, regimes, and men (I acknowledge that, yes, that could describe all of The Politics). Anyway, there was a particular line (or series of lines) that I found very interesting: namely, the section that stated that a man who had nothing to contribute to a city was like a god among men, and he shouldn’t bother to follow the laws of the city, and furthermore, it would be unjust for people to attempt to apply laws to him, since it would be unjust to ask him to lower himself to the level of those less excellent than him.

First off, as divisive as I know Ayn Rand is, isn’t this a pretty Objectivist principle? That there are people who are just better than everyone else, and they don’t have to obey the same petty morality that binds us all? I mean, that’s basically the entire plot of Atlas Shrugged.

Also, isn’t there a pretty strong current of this in Nietzsche, with the idea of the Overman? As the ape is to the human, so is the human to the Overman (or so spoke Zarathustra). Is it too much of a stretch to say that that relationship is like that of a god to a man?

Finally, is this the right thing to do? Should these people be allowed to do whatever they please? Is it unjust to control those greater than us, or is it the safe, prudent thing to do? By limiting them with our laws, do we limit what achievements are possible, or do we ensure that we might, one day, join them?