Proceedings, issue 2

Thanks to a little ingenuity and a lot of plagiarism, the Proceedings of the Society of Drinking a lot of Cough Syrup is back with a second issue. The contents are as follows.

Moving Forward by Reading Backwards and Forwards

Ben Bronner and Anonymous

Wittgenstein said that philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language. We argue that perhaps the most bewitching aspect of our language is its left-to-right structure, which subtly insinuates that the world which it pictures also possesses a left-to-right structure, a privileged direction. The solution, of course, is that philosophy should be written solely in palindromes. Some claim this stricture would inhibit genuinely philosophical discussion, to which we respond: Do geese see God?

An Ikea-Priest Axiomatization of Mereology

Sam Baron

I argue that standard mereological axioms are incomplete and must be supplemented with the Ikea axiom: for any entity E composed of parts P1 … Pn, there is always some part P* that is left over. I demonstrate that P* both is and is not a part of E. I prove, as a theorem of the system, that only Graham Priest can assemble Ikea furniture.

The Haunted Yo-Yo

Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini

A recent article in this Journal (‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’, issue 1) claims that ”the fact that we don’t see any ghosts actually makes it more likely that there really are ghosts.” This conclusion, I argue, is supported only by the most specious and sophistical of arguments. For, as even the casual parapsychologist is aware, ghosts are composed of ectoplasm, which passes frictionlessly through other substances. It is an elementary consequence of the theory of gravitation that an object falling frictionlessly towards a point will ‘overshoot’ it, eventually returning to the selfsame location where its fall began. True science and right reason, therefore, predict the periodic return of each ghost to the location of its supernatural origin (id est, the site of the death of its flesh-host). This is in fact what is observed. The constant, rapid motion of ghosts also accounts, via the Doppler effect, for the peculiar nature of their vocalizations (compare the typical ‘oooOOOooo’ of a ghost to the sound of a passing train).

Thanks to David Black for valuable feedback. Authors are invited to submit abstracts to Proceedings.Syrup@gmail.com. The editors are especially interested in abstracts on monism for a forthcoming special issue. All submissions may be edited according to the whims and fancies of journal staff and passersby.

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