Last night I couldn't sleep so I pick up an old favorite: Woody Allen's Getting Even. It's one of my favorite books of short stories. Anyways, I reread Mr. Big; an over-the-top detective styled story with all the trappings of a Philosophy 101 class. It seemed particularly relevant as Allen takes a swipe at logical positivists!
Here's a taste:
"Well, she's lying. She's a teacher at Radcliffe. She was mixed up with a philosopher for a while."
"Pantheist?"
"No. Empiricist, as I remember. Bad guy. Completely rejected Hegel or any dialectical methodology."
"One of those."
"Yeah. He used to be a drummer with a jazz trio. Then he got hooked on Logical Positivism. When that didn't work, he tried Pragmatism. Last I heard he stole a lot of money to take a course in Schopenhauer at Columbia. The mob would like to find him - or get their hands on his textbooks so they can resell them."
"Take it from me, Kaiser. There's no one out there. It's a void. I couldn't pass all those bad checks or screw society the way I do if for one second I was able to recognize any authentic sense of Being. The universe is strictly phenomenological. Nothing's eternal. It's all meaningless."
Click here for the rest of Mr. Big.
Near the bottom of the page is a button, "Show full text"
9/10ths from the bottom of that page is the story, Mr. Big
Friday, March 6, 2009
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