Dogmat circulates

O end of term dilemmas! Which party to go to? In the final analysis, I chose the path of least resistance: Matches' birthday bash. I gave him a rather fetching old copy of short stories by Bertrand Russell, a suitable gift for the continentally challenged.

After a thoroughly useless Saturday, I thought that a quiet spot of red tea would do the world of good. And it did. I had a few interesting talks with people. My opening gambit of the evening was "if you had to choose between a person getting killed, or the Mona Lisa being destroyed, which would you go for?" This was a discussion that I had been having during the day, with Lila, Axel, and, later, Brn. Does it sound like a piece of philosophical impoverishment? Yes, well, ole Danny Dennett talks about it somewhere in one of his popular science works (the book just happened to fall open on this - obviously well thumbed - page while Axel was perusing it), and it certainly has all the hallmarks of an irritating Anglo-Saxon thought experiment. And yet...

I also had the good luck to chat to a Norwegian physics student, who gracefully explained what Wave-Particle Duality means, why the sky is blue, what a quantum computer can do (and why), and how a hologram works. What's more, he enjoyed it, unlike the last physics student I happened upon at a party, whom I coerced into explaining the theory of relativity, with diagrams, equations - the works.

As nights draw in, academic gossip intensifies. Glueboot emailed me the other day, to tell me that our new VC (who'll be replacing Marty Vanderpoot) has written on Deleuze and Virilio. Maybe we can wonder how much he can have learnt from these thinkers considering that he is now an administrative bigwig, but maybe that isn't necessary - it is good news all the same.
I also heard a piece of broken telephone speculation which seems so unbelievable that it would be irresponsible to reproduce it here...
A Baudrillardian friend told me that he was told that Professor Elusive-Hyphen wrote an email to every member of our philosophy department saying simply: "If you want all the Continental philosophers to leave, just say so."
Even if this tale isn't true, or has been distorted beyond recognition, I want to believe it. I find it comforting to know that at least one of my teachers has some cojones. Dammit!

Later, I had been trying to describe the difference between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty to a Wittgensteinian pal, when we were interrupted by someone drunkenly frolicking.
When we resumed our discussion, he said: "What were we talking about again? Oh yeah, Wittgenstein..."
No, we were actually talking about phenomenology you fuckwit.