EVANSTON, IL—A preeminent philosopher at an elite university has perfected the art of haphazardly filling his bookshelf with books he will never read. Jacques Johnson, 63, said, “I have everything here. Like, everything. I’ve got Kant, Locke, Leibniz, Plato, Aristotle, the Presocratics, Russell, Kripke, Anscombe, Searle, Ryle, Ayer, Grice, Frege, and dozens of people who are still alive like Michael
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In college, my adviser introduced me to elementary logic and opened my eyes to the beauty of academic philosophy, at once dispelling popular misconceptions of philosophy as mere intellectual masturbation and adumbrating the hows and whys of the bullshitty things that give philosophy a bad name. It’s been many years since I wrote my last paper on bullshit, and my
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COLUMBUS—An ambitious PhD student at Ohio State was intent on cleaning the microwave oven in the graduate office, where 30 highly educated assholes reside. 24-year-old Rita Lin graduated from the prestigious Chinese University of Hong Kong with a degree in philosophy and the dream of becoming a well-read janitor in the land of the free. “Cantonese food is less greasy than
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CHATTANOOGA, TN—An overly talkative woman talked nonstop about how her boyfriend complains about her talking too much. Janelle Adams, 32, said, “He’s always, like, complaining about how I talk too much, and I know that I might like to, you know, express my opinions and viewpoints on things, but, like, at the same time I feel like he should be
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