A Riddle

What is greater than God, more evil than the devil, rich people don't have it, poor people do, and if you eat it, you die?  Email me your answer!  (Riddle provided to me by J.B. Reidenbaugh.)

An essay by Steve Martin (a philosophy major in college) from The New York Times

This is the well-known philosophers' drinking song, written by Eric Idle and performed by the inimitable Monty Python troupe.  You can both listen to a Real Audio version of the song by clicking, and read the lyrics.

What's an argument? The classic Monty Python sketch gives an answer.  Alas, no Real Audio version, but at least you can read along.

The Pythons tackle this age-old question.

Another classic Python sketch.  It's the Greeks vs. the Germans.  In two parts. Here is part one.  And here is part two.  If you go to this page, and scroll down a bit, you can see images from the match (look for the "Internationale Philosophie" image about one-third of the way down).

A marvelous collection of quotations from philosophers both living and dead.

(From the Editor's Introduction)
The pantheon of philosophy has contributed previous little to the English language, compared with other fields. What can philosophy offer to compare with the galvanizing volts, ohms and watts of physics, the sandwiches, cardigans, and raglan sleeves of the British upper crust, the sado-masochism of their Continental counterparts, oreven the leotards of the circus world? We speak of merely platonic affairs, and Gilbert Ryle has given his name to a measure of beer (roughly three-quarters of a pint), but the former is inappropriate to say the least, and the latter is restricted to the patois used in certain quarters of Oxford. There are, of course, the legion of pedantic terms ending in "ian" and "ism", such as "neo-Augustinian Aristotelianism", "Russellian theory of descriptions", and such marginally philosophic terms as "Cartesian coordinate" and "Machiavellian", but these terms have never been, nor deserved to be, a living part of the language. To remedy this situation we propose that philosophers make a self-conscious effort to adopt the following new terms. With a little practice these terms can become an important part of your vocabulary, to the point that you will wonder how philosophy ever proceeded without them.

An imaginative rendering of a Jerry Springer show devoted to couples who can't resolve their philosophical differences.

The confessions of a recovering addict.

What you certainly won't be seeing on the next episode of Jenny Jones.  A nice companion to the Springer show above.

This is more mathematics than it is philosophy, but it's funny, and I teach logic, so it earns its spot here. This is a classic story by Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock.  A must for those of you dealing with "story problems" in math classes.

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