Philosophical Clippings

Assembled by Norman Swartz
Simon Fraser University

Humor in Philosophy A collection of paragraphs that have amused me in philosophical writings.

"The Honour of Israel Gow" from The Amazing Adventures of Father Brown, by G.K. Chesterton, 1910. (Nice illustration of the concept of underdeterminism in creating empirical theories)

Euclid's Axioms.

Karl Popper's account of Scientific Theories (short excerpt)

The Myth of the Flat Earth (a discussion in the emailgroups PHILOSOP and LOGIC-L, 1992-1996).

"The Monkey's Paw", by W.W. Jacobs. (This story strikes me as embodying the Leibnizian view of the world, viz. that this is the best of all possible worlds – that any attempt to 'meddle' with the course of nature can only make the world worse.)

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