On the humorous side...

[Ozme52]

Do you think Descarte got it right?

Cognito ergo sum.


...or do you believe it's more along the lines of,


Bibo ergo sum?



--- or maybe even, to be more on point,


Flagello ergo sum?

[Aesop]

Descartes is sitting in a bar, having a drink. The bartender asks him if he would like another. "I think not," he says, and vanishes in a puff of logic.

Desipio ergo sum.

[Ozme52]

heh heh.

[Ozme52]

An interesting read for all you philosophers out there.


Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott

[Lina]

I think Descartes was an idiot...does that mean it is true? most people...philosophers especialy will dissagree with me that he was an idiot and that cogito ergo sum is brilliant...well...if i think he is an idiot therefore he is...but they don't think he was so therefore he isn't...well...which is it/ i think i just gave myself a headach.

[Aesop]

Confusus ergo sum?

[Ozme52]

I think Descartes was an idiot...does that mean it is true? most people...philosophers especialy will dissagree with me that he was an idiot and that cogito ergo sum is brilliant...well...if i think he is an idiot therefore he is...but they don't think he was so therefore he isn't...well...which is it/ i think i just gave myself a headach.

Lina, as a child or young adult, did you ever wonder if you and the world we live in was an illusion... not real, perhaps even the dream of a higher being and we're all just characters in the dream? How do you prove it one way or the other. Descarte boiled it down into one simple statement. I don't know if he was brilliant or an idiot, but at the least, he had one moment of brilliant clarity. Good enough for me.

[Lina]

Lina, as a child or young adult, did you ever wonder if you and the world we live in was an illusion... not real, perhaps even the dream of a higher being and we're all just characters in the dream? How do you prove it one way or the other. Descarte boiled it down into one simple statement. I don't know if he was brilliant or an idiot, but at the least, he had one moment of brilliant clarity. Good enough for me.

Interesting precept...I am actualy rather fond of saying that we are the cosmic equivalent of "friends". I joke that God/Alah/Budda/whatever gets bored and decides to just tune in and go "hmmmm how can i make them do something entertaining today?" I know what Descartes was saying...I just think he oversimplified it to the point that a very briliant insite lost it's potency...just my two cents...and i doubt it is worth even that much

[Sklaventreiber]

I know nothing of philosophy, in fact I find it bores me. Unfortunately I am constantly spouting my own philosophy(s) onto others...

here's my take:

"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world." Buddha

[Uncle_Ed]

I think Monty Python says it all:

Philosophers Drinking Song.

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.

Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.

David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, [some versions have 'Schopenhauer and Hegel']

And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.


.

There's nothing Nietzche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.

Plato, they say, could stick it away--
Half a crate of whisky every day.

Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle.
Hobbes was fond of his dram,

And René Descartes was a drunken fart.
'I drink, therefore I am.'

Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed,
A lovely little thinker,
But a bugger when he's pissed.

I wish I'd written that

[Ozme52]

Love the new name Ed.

The line for Descartes... in the Latin, would be, as I originally suggested,

Bibo ergo sum. LOL

Love Python, had forgotten this particular ditty.
Thanx

[Alex Bragi]

Congnito or cogito?

...Bibo ergo sum. LOL

...

Re vera, potas bene. *lol*

How about: Cogito ergo luna? *lol*

[MsUther]

I offended my philosophy lecturer by raising a question about Kant beeing an anal fixated (in-lack-of-the-right-word) controll freak. I still find this annoying. A rigid and probably frigid! man so set in his ways he never even left the town he lived in, is stating "truth`s" about, among lots and lots of other things, how people in the big cities lives and should live.
My lecturer was chairman in the Norwegian Kant Asscotiation. He was an anal fixated controll freak.
Ooh i bet he is submissive!

[cheeseburger]

An interesting read for all you philosophers out there.


Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott

This book isn't just about philosophy - it's a pretty accurate description of what it would be like to live in 2D space. I believe the same author wrote a book about living in a spherical world (maybe someone can correct me on this?).

I guess the point i'm driving at here is that it's not strictly philosophy, which you might already know

And about Descartes, he's considered to be the guy that invented the coordinate system (hence the name cartesian plane) among lots of other neat things. So he definetly wasn't stupid, in the sense that he was incapable of logical thought, (which he wasn't).

re-reading that last sentence I can barely understand what I meant...

[TheKnothead]

Do you think Descarte got it right?
Cognito ergo sum.
...or do you believe it's more along the lines of,
Bibo ergo sum?
--- or maybe even, to be more on point,
Flagello ergo sum?

well...my philosophy is this:

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean their not out to get you.

How do you say that in latin?

Note the clever use of the dreaded double negative....

[Asia]

I think Monty Python says it all:

Philosophers Drinking Song.

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.

Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.

David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, [some versions have 'Schopenhauer and Hegel']

And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.


.

There's nothing Nietzche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.

Plato, they say, could stick it away--
Half a crate of whisky every day.

Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle.
Hobbes was fond of his dram,

And René Descartes was a drunken fart.
'I drink, therefore I am.'

Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed,
A lovely little thinker,
But a bugger when he's pissed.

I wish I'd written that

Excellent! I forgot about that!
I think you should be the head of the Ministry of Funny Walks! *laughs*

And aye, I'm Brian and so is my wife!
Asia
xxx

[TheKnothead]

The immortal words of Socrates, "I drank what ?!?"

[TomOfSweden]

Descartes was a rationalist which means that there has to be axioms somewhere or drawing logical conclusions is impossible. We all know that their are no axioms in human behaviour. We can change the universal constants at a whim just by thinking about them differently. He believed in god for example, which any modern philosopher would just say is an absurd statement. We can't say anything more about god than we could anything we can make up at the spur of the moment.

The rationalist aproach works great for maths but it fails anywhere else. Descartes saw humans as supremly logical beings, which we today know is false. There's not a lot in the brain that's logical. It's just a bunch of neurons connected in a way that increases our survivability rate. Instincts if you will. We may fool ourselves into believing we're logical because we can outsmart all the other animals, but that isn't saying much. Dogs are smarter than rabbits. That doesn't make dogs supremly logical beings. It's not that we're incapable of logical reasoning, we're just not very good at it.

Richard Dawkins effectively kills of Descartes in his book, "the selfish gene", and Dawkins isn't even a philosopher.

When studying philosophy at university, (grad school to Americans) there's an unhealthy focus on old crap that we since long moved on from. I consider Nietzshe being the stepping stone taking human awarness onto the next level. Anything before it is nice to know, for learning terminology if nothing else or for learning our philosophic history, but it has very little relevance to modern thinking. God is dead and let's move on.

I've read a lot of philosophy and I strongly recomend the philosophers Focault, Deleuze and Lacan.