A series of teasers I designed in the format of flyers or stickers to be put at public places in order to make people think about some scientific/philosophical concepts/questions. They provide related keywords to google. I’ll try to make new ones when I have time. Feel free to email me if you’re interested in printing them as PDFs.
I came upon this philosophical lexicon by Daniel Dennett and Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen, and it just doubled my love for Dennett. It includes French post-structuralists and philosophers of science such as Feyerabend and Kuhn as well as people from modern philosophy of mind such as Block and Searle.
Check it out for yourself, it is huge. Here are some favorites of mine:
block, n. (1) (shortened from mental block) A sort of organic stoprule or safety valve that prevents people from going crazy when they consider thought experiments exploiting combinatorial explosion. “It’s a good thing I had a block just then! I was getting a trifle dizzy when he started going on about storing all the possible descriptions of the universe in a book made out of tiny galaxies pretending they’re electrons.” n. (2) A small but obdurate obstacle preventing the smooth operation of a mechanism, a spanner in the works. Hence, mental block, an objection to functionalism obsessively maintained in the face of all manner of refutations, blandishments and appeals to common cause.
chomsky, adj. Said of a theory that draws extravagant metaphysical implications from scientifically established facts. “Essentially, Hume’s criticism of the Argument from Design is that it leads in all its forms to blatantly chomsky conclusions.” “The conclusions drawn from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle are not only on average chomskier than those drawn from Godel’s theorem; most of them are downright merleau-ponty.”
deleuzion, n. A false, persistent philosophical belief, unsubstantiated by evidence or argument. “He suffered from the deleuzion that Spinoza could be used to clarify Lacanian psychoanalysis.”
derrida. A sequence of signs that fails to signify anything beyond itself. From a old French nonsense refrain: “Hey nonny derrida, nonny nonny derrida falala.”
feyerabend, n. (fr. German “feuer” & “abend”) The last brilliant moment of a conceptual framework before death and transfiguration. Every conceptual framework has its feyerabend.
foucault, n. A howler, an insane mistake. “I’m afraid I’ve committed an egregious foucault.”
heidegger, n. A ponderous device for boring through thick layers of substance. “It’s buried so deep we’ll have to use a heidegger.” Also useful for burying one’s own past.
immanuel, n. (from im-, not, + manual, guide or rulebook) A set of instructions for doing something that kant (q.v.) be done.
lacanthropy, n. The transformation, under the influence of the full moon, of a dubious psychological theory into a dubious social theory via a dubious linguistic theory.
nagel, v. To sense, vaguely, that something crucial but ineffable has been left out of account. “No sooner had I completed my proof that the robot was conscious than I was beset by a swarm of nageling doubts.”
sart, adj. Smart, but with something important missing. Generally, smart only inasmuch as not-smart, and apparently smart to those with severe vision problems. Hence the comparative “sartre” (Brit. sp.) meaning “more sart,” i.e. more intelligible to exactly the extent that a thing is less intelligible.
searley, adj. Contemptuous of leftist political thought, because of presumed lack of rigor. “When the demonstrators asked whether ‘academic freedom’ meant freedom to pursue war research, the Dean turned quite searley.”
wittgenstein, v. To enumerate. “Don’t bother to wittgenstein all these pages; the fax machine will do it automatically.”
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