[lit-ideas] "Between Boiling One Baby And ..."

From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:00:13 EDT
In a message dated 4/23/2009 2:43:03 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
rpaul@xxxxxxxx writes:
if you had to choose between boiling one baby and  letting some
frightful disaster befall a thousand people—or a million  people, if a
thousand is not enough—what would you do?
-----

Call  me an idiot, but I'm confused.

Isn't she implicating that someone _may_  say, "Boil it".

It's odd that in English, 'baby' is usually  _neuter_.

So she _is_ quoting Truman's words.

"The Baby with the  Water" -- losing the baby with the water, or something
like that. I usually  found that expression _archaic_. A newt maybe, but how
can an ordinarily sized  baby get thrown with the water in the tub?

----

Anscombe may be  understimating the power of 'one' and 'a'.

To use Grice's  example,

"I went to a house, and found a dog, and then a woman" (WOW,  iii)

It would be otiose if that applied to Grice returning to _his_  house, his
dog and his wife.

It matters the world whose house, dog, and  woman we're talking about.

There's also the case of the decoy baby  (Austin's example, "It's not a
real baby. It's plastic --"

If the baby is believed to be 'the son of the devil' (within the context of
 a short story say, "The Exorcist") while not boiling per se, the
desappearance  of the baby may be mandatory even on moral or sacred grounds.

Oddly, some women make a lot of fuss about Honorary Degrees in Oxford.
Grice joked about this when in Aspects of Reason (2001) he uses the  example,

     "Nixon must become the chair of Moral philosophy  in Oxford"

--- he is analysing what he calls 'internal' and external uses of 'must'.
Give me one linguistic entangler and boil the 'real' philosopher cited by
Wager  ('excremental assault'. Imagine theses written on that).

JLS

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[lit-ideas] "Between Boiling One Baby And ..."

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