A cabinet of philosophical curiosities
Subtitle: a collection of puzzles, oddities, riddles and dilemmas
By: Roy Sorensen
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 289
ISBN-13: 9780199829569
Subjects: Miscellanea; Logic
Description: "A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities is a colorful collection of puzzles and paradoxes, both historical and contemporary, by philosopher Roy Sorensen. Taking inspiration from Ian Stewart's Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, which assembled interesting "maths" from outside the classroom into a miscellany of marvels, these puzzles are ready to be enjoyed independently but gain mutual support when read in clusters. The volume ranges from simple examples to anomalous anomalies, considers data that seems to confirm a generalization while lowering its probability, and argues that we are doomed to believe infinitely many contradictions-and that the pain of contradictions can be profoundly stimulating. Inside this book you will learn of John Eck, who debated Luther in 1519. He devised a sequence of contracts that sidestepped usury laws, and German bankers made a fortune from this Triple Contract. Sorensen also recounts how Voltaire set himself up for life by exploiting a fallacy in the construction of a Parisian lottery. There is logic for altruists, too. You will discover how General Benjamin Butler used other-centric reasoning to protect runaway slaves. There are historical snapshots of logic in action, and the book contains tributes to Lewis Carroll, Arthur Prior, and Peter Geach. In addition to short essays, there are dialogues, cures and insults."--Goodreads.com.
Table of contents: title: Conform to confound; title: Razing hopes; title: Hidden messages in songs; title: A blessed book curse; title: Listen for a counterexample; title: Schopenhauer's intelligence test; title: A knucklehead on my premises; title: The Tversky intelligence test; title: A matter of life and death; title: The identity of indiscernibles; title: Indiscernible pills; title: Telling a clover from a plover; title: The emotional range of logicians; title: A pebble from the Baths of Caracalla; title: Assassination proof; title: How to succeed your successor; title: Not all logicians are saints; title: Lewis Carroll's peek at Meno's slave boy; title: The elderly scientist; title: More proof!; title: Emily Dickinson's hummingbird; title: Plato's packing problem; title: Telepathy for the absent-minded; title: Order of absence versus absence of order; title: Neglect of the absent; title: Child proof; title: Wittgenstein's parallelograms; title: Knowing the area of a parallelogram; title: Freud versus the dreaming logicians; title: Do butterflies dream?; title: Descartes's disappearance; title: The most fairly distributed good; title: Fairness framed; title: Towards a fairer share of dishwashing; title: What the dishwasher missed; title: Developmental self-defeat; title: Random quiz; title: Enforcing Gresham's Law; title: Gresham's Law of Numbers; title: Laziest Reductio; title: Imaginary travel companions; title: The Twin Cities race; title: Fugu for two; title: Deducing names; title: Richard Feynman is inconsistent; title: Galbraith's cow; title: Logical names for babies; title: Being relatively ill-named; title: Roman resemblance humour; title: The prison-house of language; title: Bilingual humour; title: The Pierre puzzle and implicit racism; title: Capital pronunciation; title: Logically perfect language; title: Eyebrow punctuation; title: Kierkegaard's 1 AU dash; title: Putting out your second eye; title: A pyramid schema; title: The eighteenth camel; title: The negation test for nonsense; title: Shifty O's; title: A plenum of palindromes for Lewis Carroll; title: Pining for the impossible; title: Anything is possible?; title: Half full or half empty?; title: The scientific drinker; title: Is Akrasia crazy?; title: A cure for incontinence!; title: Lewis Carroll's pig puzzles; title: A round trip from small to large; title: Partway down the slippery slope; title: Contrapositive thinking; title: Queer quantities; title: New Zealand's Arthur Prior; title: Most remote capital city; title: The logic of 'Australia"; title: Predicting your predictor; title: The freedom of a coin toss; title: Wittgenstein on ice; title: The unbearable lightness of logical conclusions; title: Impossible crimes; title: Double belief; title: - The evil of doing the impossible; title: Identity theft; title: Infinite chess; title: Infinite two-minute debate; title: Indian debate tournament; title: Winning by losing; title: Minimising selfishness; title: Lawrence of Arabia collars a leopard; title: A bridge without pillars; title: Advice from Shih Teng; title: Thales' shady measurement of pyramids; title: The cowpox transmission problem; title: Kant's gloves; title: An antipodal algorithm; title: The invisibility of function words; title: Necessary waste; title: The art of the counterexample; title: The philosophy of scale effects; title: Humble exercise; title: Philosophy for the eye; title: Synthetic a priori lies; title: Passive a priori deception; title: Crete revisited; title: Less lucky the second time?; title: Professor ignorance; title: Nothing is written in stone; title: Self-fulfilling, self-defeating prophecies; title: The philosopher's petition; title: Napoleon's meta-discovery; title: Handicaps on deduction; title: Logical insults; title: Logical humility; title: Blasphemous tautologies; title: Generality jokes and consistency proofs; title: To be and not to be; title: Lobster logic; title: The triple contract; title: Voltaire's big bet; title: Biblical counting; title: Russell's slip of the pen; title: The first female philosopher?; title: Is a burrito and sandwich?; title: Second place; title: The drachma's defect; title: Illogical coin collecting; title: The centime and the bottle imp; title: A meeting of minds; title: Deadliest Gettier case; title: Premature explanatory satiation; title: Upside-down charity; title: Does charity apply to group beliefs?; title: The population of Lake Wobegon; title: Following the argument; title: The earliest unexpected class inspection; title: A foolproof guessing game; title: Predicting your death date; title: The oldest mosque; title: The referee's dilemma; title: The worst pair of referee reports; title: A terrible tautology?; title: Quantifier mottos; title: The Chinese music box; title: Christmas Eve 364; title: Putting parody into practice; title: Hoax proof; title: Penny wise; title: Plato's punning riddle; title: Chess puzzle puzzle; title: The spy's riddle; title: Why one is the loneliest number; title: The moment of truth; title: Preventing prevarication; title: Argument and Oscar Wilde's "The Decay of Lying"; title: Ethics of supposition; title: Behaviourism for eggs; title: The egg came before the chicken; title: The egg came before the ellipse; title: Martin Gardner's touching problem; title: Indiscernible harm; title: Book review of A Million Random Digits; title: An unjust but fair obituary; title: Reflective truth tables; title: The bikini palindrome; title: Family resemblance for primates; title: Minimal resemblance; title: Brother-in-law resemblance; title: Tolstoy's syllogism; title: Woody Allen's death wish; title: Checkmate in aleph-nought; title: A memory lapse; title: The penultimate state; title: Fame as the forgotten philosopher; title: The answers.