[lit-ideas] Re: The meaning of life
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Mike Geary <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2008 20:58:25 -0330
No, logically contradictory statements cannot both be true in "real" life or
any other kind of life characterized by rationality. Nor can they both be
false.
It's just another one of them transcendental things.
To wit:
(Ahem)
Loving both the fair and the brown
a contradictory relation does not make.
If one loves the fair,
one can also love the brown.
And if one loves the brown,
one can also love the fair.
And yet, should one love not the fair,
'tis folly to aver one must love the brown.
Which leads us to conclude,
if one loves the brown
one may also love the fair.
And all who fall in between.
Behold the circle of life, love and logic.
If this John fellow believes otherwise, he is mistaken. But we have no
evidence
that the man was logically challenged. Being a Metaphysician, he may not have
committed a logical fallacy in his entire life. (Perchance a marital fallacy
...)
The fellah does, however, have a grammar problem ... big time. Worse than
Milton's. Are editors unavailable to poets for some reason?
Walter O.
T. Egerton Professor of Logic and Poetry
School of Metaphysics
Oxford, Kansas
Quoting Mike Geary <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>
> DMcE:
> >> 'a' and 'non-a' logically contradict - that is, they cannot both be
> true..
>
> Maybe this is where I disagree with all y'all. Of course, they can both be
> true -- not within a rigid consistent system perhaps, but in real life?
>
>
> I can love both fair and brown;
> Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays;
> Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays;
> Her whom the country form'd, and whom the town;
> Her who believes, and her who tries;
> Her who still weeps with spongy eyes,
> And her who is dry cork, and never cries.
> I can love her, and her, and you, and you;
> I can love any, so she be not true.
>
>
> You would have John Donne be logical? Shame on you! Life is not played
> according to Hoyle. It is not the game logicians would make of it. Life is
> goulash. Dig in.
>
>
> Mike Geary
> a liberal Memphian
> a living contradiction
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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