Given the title of this post, you may be wondering what on earth this could possibly be about. Well, deep within the bowels (sorry!) of Aristotle’s œuvre lurks this fragrant little gem regarding the defensive capabilities of the bison.
It tosses up dust and scoops out the ground with its hooves, like the bull. Its skin is impervious to blows. Owing to the savour of its flesh it is sought for in the chase. When it is wounded it runs away, and stops only when thoroughly exhausted. It defends itself against an assailant by kicking and projecting its excrement to a distance of eight yards; this device it can easily adopt over and over again, and the excrement is so pungent that the hair of hunting-dogs is burnt off by it.
As anyone with anything more than a passing acquaintance with early modern philosophy knows, Descartes rather famously enlisted the help of God to guarantee the validity of his perceptions (for God would not be so cruel as to deceive us). But did you ever consider what the consequences of this solution would be for non-believers?
French feminist and social theorist Luce Irigaray has issues with Einstein’s theory of relativity:
Is E=Mc² a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged that which goes faster …
There is a persistent rumor, perpetuated primarily by historians of astronomy, that G.W.F. Hegel provided a logical proof that there could only be seven planets in the solar system. This diabolical proof supposedly lurks within his 1801 doctoral dissertation. However, in the only section that could possibly contain such a claim, that entitled ‘De orbitis planetarum’, the proof is difficult to spot …
In his posthumous work On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein made a number of statments regarding the possiblity/impossibility of travelling to the moon. There is no small amount of confusion about his comments amongst philosophers, due in part to Wittgenstein making more than one reference to moon travel …
Aristotle had some interesting ideas on the role of the brain:
For the brain, or in creatures without a brain that which corresponds to it, is of all parts of the body the coolest. Therefore, as moisture turned into vapour by the sun’s heat is, when it has ascended to the upper regions, cooled by the coldness of the latter, and becoming condensed, is carried downwards, and turned into water once more; just so the excrementitious evaporation, when carried up by the heat to the region of the brain, is condensed into a ‘phlegm’ (which explains why catarrhs are seen to proceed from the head); while that evaporation which is nutrient and not unwholesome, becoming condensed, descends and cools the hot. The tenuity or narrowness of the veins about the brain itself contributes to its being kept cool, and to its not readily admitting the evaporation …
Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked in his Tractatus that:
4.1122 Darwin’s theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science …
A short quote, but it’s fairly to-the-point kind of text. The Tractatus-era Wittgenstein had a very narrow idea of the role of philosophy …
Friedrich Nietzsche had some interesting ideas about The Origin of the Ears:
Night and music. – The ear, the organ of fear, could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life of the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been; in bright daylight the ear is less necessary. That is how music acquired the character of an art of night and twilight …