I've decided I'll try to update semi-regularly (if not frequently) with little things from my studies that amuse me - whether amusing examples or paradoxes, things said in seminars, or whatever. Now I have a few readers, I might as well entertain them (or should that be 'you', assuming you're reading...?)
Here are the first two from this week (all are paraphrases):
Monday 31/10/05 Moral Philosophy Seminar
John Broome accuses Doug MacLean (the author over at Left2Right) of an intransitivity in his betterness ranking, to which MacLean responds "I think we're using 'equal to' and 'better than' in different ways", to which Broome replies "Well, I'm using them in ways conformable to logic, that's true".
Wednesday 2/11/05 Saving the Greater Number seminar
After discussing David McCarthy's ingenious mathematical tricks - which I won't pretend to understand, but which can be found at the Equality Exchange - one participant said "I think he just came up with this nice mathematical thing, and then was looking for an ethical problem where he could use it"
And a bonus one from a couple of weeks ago - my friend Kieran to my friend Rob - "I love the fact that the second [hideously complicated] thing you just said was supposed to clarify the first"
One day, one day, I will get over the urge, justified as it sometimes is, to ensure that the meaning of a statement is made clear, or at least as clear as it can be, by carefully, but with some regard to the flow of the sentence as a whole, inserting strings of subclauses, each of which meticulously states the precise reference of the previous clause. I will. Really.
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