Bertrand Russell
Showed some hustle.
He led three lives
And had four wives.
Aristotle
Went ahead full throttle,
Invented biology and psychology
Then logic and embryology.
There was no telling
What F. von Schelling
Would come up with next
But Hegel was vexed.
Max Black
Would take no flak;
He let James Ross
Know who was boss.
Socrates
Was hard to please
But once he got the notion
He drank Asklepios's potion.
Kierkegaard
Was moody and bored;
While alive he was in eksistens,
After '55 in Assistens.
I hope everyone you know
Wishes Giordano Bruno
Had not been burned
For what he had learned.
Someone should have said to Fichte,
"Hey, J.G., you should stick t'
Metaphysics and epistemology
'Coz you're no good at political ideology."
Simone de Beauvoir
Said au revoir
To promiscuity
But bonjour to ambiguity.
George L. Kline
Directed mine.
You get no Ph.D. graduation
Without a Ph.D. dissertation.
John Dewey
Knew he
Could write with impunity
Of experience as unity.
David Hume
Had no room
For careless, foolhardy guys
Who just knew the sun would rise.
Jacques Derrida
Hardly ever saw
Anything too f _ _ _ _ d
Up to deconstruct.
General Sir Harry Paget Flashman
Was always looking out for cash, man.
If he was only ten or twenty pounds short he
Bummed from Elspeth: "Better make it forty."
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Gottlob Frege
Knew math from alpha to omega
But must have been smoking a joint
When he asked if his pocket watch was a point.
W.H. Auden
Was truly sodden
If he thought no one could inveigle
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Auden wrote the following cherihew in
"Academic Graffiti," Homage to Clio (1960):
No one could ever inveigle
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Into offering the slightest apology
For his Principles of Phenomenology.
Immanuel Kant
Would never rant.
He was a stickler for morality
But pretty loose about God, freedom, and immortality.
No one was more sour
Than Arthur Schopenhauer;
With his inferiors he put on airs
And kicked his housemaid down the stairs.
There was scarcely ever a thinker as fine as
That great Dominican, Thomas Aquinas.
He drank like a fish and ate like a hog,
Lived in a cell and worked like a dog.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
Had theology just about right.
You can praise God until it's almost automatic
But it's more nearly true when it's apophatic.
René Descartes
Held body and mind apart
But believed they might be more congenial
If animal spirits flowed through the pineal.
That nihilistic egomaniac Max Stirner
Lived as a classic melodramatic bridge-burner.
Besides himself, he loved Marie, or so he felt;
Er hatte dennoch seine Sache auf Nichts gestellt!
A wacko ontology that was frankly annoyin'
Propounded George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne.
The ideality of matter Dr. Johnson did not want to discuss,
But just kicked a rock and exclaimed, "I refute him thus!"
Alfred Tarski made a clear demonstration
Of semantic truth on an interpretation.
But what would he do, this perceptive fellow,
If the snow he saw was colored yellow?
William of Ockham
Tried valiantly to talk 'em
Into positing causes warily, charily, and verily,
Not fabricating entities merrily, hairily, and imaginarily.
At Berkeley young Josiah Royce
Found no reason to rejoice.
He lamented, "There is no philosophy in California."
James might have added, "Don't say I didn't warn ya."
Marie Fabry née Colinet
Was a surgical expert in every way.
For a patient with iron slivers in his eye,
She told her husband, "Use a magnet to help that guy."
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