Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Philosophy Contest!!

Which new work by a major philosopher concludes with the following sentence?

"We make our lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands."

Someone's seriously shooting for Oprah's bookclub. One must sell many copies in order to fund one's plover egg habit....

I should offer some kind of prize to the first person who guesses, but I'm not going to.

28 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was going to guess Susan Wolf's new book Meaning in Life and Why it Matters, but a quick check proved me wrong.

Anonymous said...

C'mon. All the "major" philosophers are dead.

Anonymous said...

Given that we are dwelling as it were in the breath-condensed coating on a mite (that is, biosphere of the earth) crawling on a grain of sand (that is, orbiting the sun) among the grains of sand (all the stars) of the beaches of a thousand earths (estimated at the order of 10/\24), those are very tiny diamonds indeed.

Of course I take it that they might be the only diamonds, or some among very few elsewhere on (say) beach 42 of planet 42. We're special!

wv: fortitoo

(I'm just fucking with you! It was ghilyc.)

Rob said...

Nor, happily, is it from Hurka's.

Anonymous said...

The egg comment gives it away. That guy's a "major philosopher"???

Anonymous said...

Ummm...pre-googled, of course: Derek Parfit?

Anonymous said...

Galen Strawson?

Glaucon said...

Is it a hedgehog who might be known as 'Ronald McDorkwad'?

Anonymous said...

Dreyfus?

Anonymous said...

Is it me?

Anonymous said...

12:57, how dare you take credit for what may be my work?

Anonymous said...

Philosophers should not riff on Don Ho.

Anonymous said...

I second Parfit.

Anonymous said...

Dworkin is the plover eggs guy. In "What is Equality?" I think it's the first one.

anonymouse said...

Jim Reeves?

Anonymous said...

6:13:

I bow in reverence: welcome to my world.

wv: knacdei, as in sacking the vatican

2nd wv after error: hoessx, as in, well. . .

729 said...

John Searle?

Meno said...

Stephen Hawking's new book?

Anonymous said...

Actually Kenneth Arrow is the real plovers' eggs and pre-phylloxera wine guy. See his Ordinalist Notes on TJ in J. Phil 1973, p. 254.

But I don't think he'd be going on about tiny diamonds or anything like that.

Friendly Gentleman said...

Kornblith?

English Jerk said...

I don't even understand what that sentence is supposed to mean. If the "cosmos" is only sand, how the hell are you supposed to "make" diamonds? And if I'm living in the nothing-but-sand world, why would I care at all about being shiny?

Anonymous said...

Well, English Jerk, that's all fine, but it hardly shows that the metaphor doesn't make sense. You've misunderstood the text, is all. It means: we try to do something impossible, and even if it were possible it would be pointless and kind of narcissistic.

Anonymous said...

Parfit!

--J.P.

Anonymous said...

Using a probabilistic analysis given the syntactic construction of the quote, I have strong evidence that it was none other than... Ken Wilber!

Anonymous said...

Captain Beefheart has a posse.

http://tinyurl.com/capbeef

Anonymous said...

I'm going to guess Richard Rorty's: An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion

Spiros said...

Glaucon wins: The sappy sentence concludes Dworkin's new book, *Justice for Hedgehogs*.


Congratulations, Glaucon!

Glaucon said...

Apparently, all philosophy is a footnote to Kansas's "Dust in the Wind." I shall anxiously await the arrival of the plovers eggs. Shine on, you crazy fucking diamonds...