Philosophy in the Wild

It’s not often that one spots a bit of philosophy in the wild:

https://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004932.html

2 Comments

  1. Eric Thomson

    I was once amazed to see, hanging right behind the counter in a major clothing store, a beautiful piece of glass etched with a quite large excerpt from ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’. I was simply astounded, and unfortunately didn’t take a picture of the surreal event (I think it was at either Fashion Valley or Mission Valley mall in San Diego). I can’t even remember the store, but it was something well-known like the Gap.

    It was the section of his paper beginning:
    The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.

  2. The Wegmans chain of supermarkets in NY State used to have these glass panels with “our philosophy” etched on them; I haven’t been in a Wegmans for more than 10 years, so I can’t report on whether Quine was there, but they had some pretty fancy stuff for a grocery store.

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