Monday, September 10, 2012

"Lord knows"

We're talking, in addition to Epicurean happiness and relativism and "enhancement,"about Pyrrho and extreme (though allegedly-therapeutic) skepticism in CoPhi today. With all our talk about Platonic cats I'm reminded of a scene in Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. The nameless "man who rules the Universe" turns out, in that fable, to be a kind of Pyrrhonian.

And here's where I'll switch metaphors, from cats to fish, to suggest a useful mnemonic: Pyrrhonian skeptics, given the right mispronunciation, are like those toothy flounders who (it is popularly believed) will devour everything (beliefs included) in their path. Or will seem to, at least in your mind.

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