[a monkey shifting his oyster]: Happy Birthday, Mark Twain

Friday, November 30, 2012

Happy Birthday, Mark Twain

Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes, and wishes he was certain.

-Mark Twain, Notebook, 1879

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Monkey Quote

Any very ignorant person, who can but make a proposition, and knows what he means when he says ay or no, may make a million of propositions of whose truth he may be infallibly certain, and yet not know one thing in the world thereby; v.g. "what is a soul, is a soul,"; or, "a soul is a soul"; "a spirit is a spirit"; "a fetiche is a fetiche," &c. These all being equivalent to this proposition, viz. what is, is; i.e. what hath existence, hath existence; or, who hath a soul, hath a soul. What is this more than trifling with words? It is but like a monkey shifting his oyster from one hand to the other: and had he but words, might no doubt have said, "Oyster in right hand is subject, and oyster in left hand is predicate": and so might have made a self-evident proposition of oyster, i.e. oyster is oyster; and yet, with all this, not have been one whit the wiser or more knowing: and that way of handling the matter would much at once have satisfied the monkey's hunger, or a man's understanding, and they would have improved in knowledge and bulk together.

Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding IV.viii.3

Monkey Books

The Evolution of Morality

by Richard Joyce

tagged: evolution and moral-philosophy

Hume's Moral Theory

by J.L. Mackie

tagged: history-of-philosophy, hume, and moral-philosophy

Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do

by Michael J. Sandel

tagged: moral-philosophy and political-philosophy

The Essential Smart Football

by Chris B. Brown

tagged: frivolity

Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters

by Donald R. Prothero

Very good book. Prothero isn't a great writer, and the prose is awkward at times, but this book (especially the second half) is a relentless barrage of well-documented facts about the existence of the transitional forms and fossils creat...

tagged: biology, evolution, and reviewed

The Riddle of Hume's Treatise

by Paul Russell

The standard interpretation of Hume's Treatise involves two seemingly unrelated theses. First, it is widely believed that the Treatise was "castrated" of its religious components and is thus neutral with respect to religious questions. S...

tagged: empiricism, godlessness, history-of-philosophy, hume, moral-philoso...

Tales of Edgar Allan Poe: With an Introduction by Hervey Allen and Wood Engravings by Fritz Eichenberg

by Fritz Eichenberg

tagged: fiction and littrichure

The Secret Connexion ' Causation, Realism, and David Hume '

by Galen Strawson

Very good book. Meticulously counters the traditional view of Hume as dogmatically denying the existence of causation. Strawson shows (by close reading of Hume's texts) that Hume's arguments about 'necessary connexion' being only in the ...

tagged: empiricism, epistemology, hume, history-of-philosophy, metaphysics,...