9 Things Your Local Philosopher Won’t Tell You

1. We totally know why there’s something rather than nothing. Our lips are sealed. Have fun guessing!

2. Plato’s forms of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness were recently found in a filing cabinet in the basement of Saul and Roberta Goldstein’s home in Massapequa, N.Y.!!! But keep this one on the Q. T., folks. Nassau County officials are worried about tourist traffic clogging the Whitestone and Throgs Neck bridges.

3. All of your experiences are indeed a dream controlled by an evil demon. Sorry for the inconvenience. But in the meantime, you may as well eat that second cupcake!

4. Many philosophers argue what is intrinsically valuable is either the exercise of rationality or the pursuit of knowledge. Totally coincidentally, those just happen to be what we do for our paychecks!! Aren’t we just the most valuable little things you ever did see?!

5. The word “philosophy” means “love of wisdom.” But, shhh, don’t tell. Most of us don’t like wisdom as more than a friend.

6. Derrida once said, “The question of the self: ‘who am I’ not in the sense of ‘who am I’ but rather ‘who is this “I”‘ that can say ‘who’? What is the ‘I,’ and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the ‘I’ trembles in secret?” Yes, of course that makes total sense. As Derrida also said, “Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.”   Please understand: if you don’t understand a philosopher, it cannot be because the philosopher wrote obscurely. It is because you are stupid and lazy.

7. It may be demonstrated a priori how much wood a woodchuck would chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

8. Wittgenstein once said, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” He had obviously never been to a conference presentation at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division.

9. People often accuse us of blathering on about questions with no answers. But at long last, we have proven a philosophical truth!!!!!! For all X there is a Y such that X and Y are letters in the alphabet. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, haters!!