Immanuel Kant was a real pissant Who was very rarely stable. Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar Who could think you under the table. David Hume could out-consume Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, And Wittgenstein was a beery swine Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.There's nothing Nietzche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away--
Half a crate of whisky every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle.
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And René Descartes was a drunken fart.
'I drink, therefore I am.'Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed,
A lovely little thinker,
But a bugger when he's pissed
--- Monty Python, The Philosopher's Drinking Song
And that my friends is about all the levity you will get from me this
evening.
It's a handy little tool, though, for trying to remember the core
teachings of a few philosophers, don't you think? If I can read Leviathan
over a weekend, enter class and have my political theory professor sum
up that massive and incredibly boring book in six words---"Life is
nasty, brutish and short"---and then move on to Rosseau without even
discussing it, I can most assuredly refer you to a drinking song to
remind you what Descartes core message was. Rene Descartes was a drunken fart, I drink therefore I am.
Cogito Ergo Sum. I think therefore I am. Descartes was part of
that great post-Renaissance philosophical movement in the Baroque Era
in Europe. He was part of that group of men, emboldened by the
intellectual break from the Church due to the Reformation, yet still
very religious, who wanted to figure out how the world worked. That
included human thought. To quote the link above:
{...}The two most widely known of Descartes'
philosophical ideas are those of a method of hyperbolic doubt, and the
argument that, though he may doubt, he cannot doubt that he exists. The
first of these comprises a key aspect of Descartes' philosophical
method. As noted above, he refused to accept the authority of previous
philosophers - but he also refused to accept the obviousness of his own
senses. In the search for a foundation for philosophy, whatever could
be doubted must be rejected. He resolves to trust only that which is
clearly and distinctly seen to be beyond any doubt. In this manner,
Descartes peels away the layers of beliefs and opinions that clouded
his view of the truth. But, very little remains, only the simple fact
of doubting itself, and the inescapable inference that something exists
doubting, namely Descartes himself. His next task is to reconstruct our
knowledge piece by piece, such that at no stage is the possibility of
doubt allowed to creep back in. In this manner, Descartes proves that
he himself must have the basic characteristic of thinking, and that
this thinking thing (mind) is quite distinct from his body; the
existence of a God; the existence and nature of the external world; and
so on. {...}