I keep on having these, "That was when I went obese" moments. Let me explain. First, I'll eat a hamburger. Then I'll have a hotdog. (what's your count for this year? the average american eats 72 hotdogs a year! beef hotdogs, kielbasa, sausage, tofu hotdogs, and chicken hotdogs all count) Then I'll have a salad. Then I'll have ice cream. Then, and here's where the comment slips into my brain's back door, "That was when I went obese."

Is there a philosophy for eating? Sure, there probably is. Is there a philosophy of nutrition and stuff like that? I'm guessing yes.

The closest thing that comes to my mind is of course hedonism. This is hedonism when I eat whatever. We actually went over hedonism earlier in this blog, and I think we went over Francis Bacon's definition of rhetoric as a way of staunching (stopping) lower hedonism for a better, higher hedonism.

Dr. Johnson says that humans move from hope to hope. It's that whole consumer thing. Our hopes can never be satisfied. I mean, that's why we keep on living. It's because if we got to the top of the peak of something, if we got to that plateau and were completely satisfied, we would just knock out. I'm interested in points of bliss because they are sort of like emotional landmarks that we can look back to. Nevertheless, I'm interested in the sort of yin and yang of this. Some of the most beautiful works of art, and certainly some my favorites, have been about the boredom and frivolity of human existence.

I have been having a recurring thought process. (Daydream seems inappropriate here. Also how come you can't footnote in blogs? I feel so incomplete). In this recurring thought process, I think of something conceptually complete, like a square (the geometric picture, not the math thing where you do x to the x). I do not think anything could be more square, unless it was something that had to be forced to become that concept. This is sort of similar to Unger's skeptical argument, to be reviewed in this blog later. Once something is geometrically square, you cannot make it any more square. It just is. Here, I therefore submit a metaphysical theory of completion. Once something is complete, there is nothing you could do to make it more of what it is. For one final example, you could make a garden more square like, but you could not change a square into anything more square-like.

Ready for the leap? I think other processes and concepts can be complete; or metaphysically complete in this way. I've been thinking about this recently about friendships. Sometimes I don't see these people whom I liked so much; and I don't know why. But when I put it like this, it sort of seems fishy, sort of superstitious.

Kant began the primitive aspects of the contemporary sciences and philosophy when he sort of implied, or at the very least acknowledged the limitations of reason. That is part of the Critique of pure reason in The Critique of Pure Reason. Part of the job of philosophy is certainly to integrate the sciences when they are too far removed from each other (get a load of the article at some point in this blog on this, where this NYT editorial poses an anti-Kant thesis! Of course this was written by a religion professor....). But another, and I think very important job of philosophy is to disintegrate and separate the sciences. I am more specifically talking about the bastardization of science.

Here are some of the classics and my favorites:

1) Opposites attract: The 20th century microphysics of electricity applied over and over to human relations.
2) Like attracts like: the opposite of the first one, maybe referring to the way that like dissolves like in polar or non polar solution reactions. Popularly misapplied in The Secret.
3) Religion and Science: like all the time, everywhere
4) Ramus's famed attack on Quintillian. Ramus says, angrily, that Quintillian's idea of rhetoric is a good man talking is horsefeathers. Rhetoric is oratory only, says Ramus.
5) Using "science" to talk about the end or the beginning of the world.
6) The use of philosophical induction (which is not mathematically deductive, as opposed to mathematical induction, which is) in Psychology.

Note on 6) Okay, time for a footnote again. Basically what happens is there's philosophical induction and mathematical induction. Philosophical induction is when you see a pattern and you suppose the next in the sequence. An example for illustration is: I hand you a fountain pen, I hand you a fountain pen, I hand you a fountain pen. What, praytell, could I hand you next? You guess a fountain pen. You guessed right.

Here's an illustrative counterexample to what we just did:

Q: Knock knock
A: Who's there?
Q: Banana
A: Banana who?
Q: Knock knock
A: Who's there?
Q: Banana
A: Banana who?
Q: Knock knock
A: [Exasperated] Who's there?
Q: Orange!!!!
A: Orange who?
Q: Orange you glad I didn't say banana?!!


This is approximately Hume's famous counterexample to induction. That is, I can give you a matchstick, a flame, a match box, and the strike; But you're going to be hardpressed to tell me that the struck match caused the flame. The big question is: where is the causation; and what is causation.

Thankfully, we have Kant to refute this and establish that there is causality. Kant's second analogy has been typed in full on this blog. My interpretation of this analogy, submitted to class, has also been posted (I think it will be in march 2009).


The problem of 6) still remains. That is, we got Kant's refutation of Hume, and ergo: induction. So yes we can have psychology and all sorts of sciences. The problem with induction still remains. We haven't gotten rid of it.


That is, a great many of those magazine statistics have met a cliff in a Wil. E. Coyote cartoon.


Anti-Kantian thesis in an editorail in the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html
This is relevant firstly because I was talking about it. It is secondarily relevant as we are discussing the integration and corresponding disintegration of sciences.