The Pictorial Arts: My Kind of Philosophy

Sunday, August 15, 2010

From an old publicity still I found wedged in the middle of an old book on philosophy. Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel—I love these guys.

Steve Scott said...: "Well... here's ANOTHER nice mess you've gotten me into!"; August 15, 2010 at 4:02 PM
Daniel [oeconomist.com] said...: Laurel and Hardy Escape the Cavern of Socrates (1930); scripted by Morris Raphael Cohen; directed by Karl Popper; produced by Hal Roach. Withdrawn from distribution after it was blasted in a Variety review by Ludwig Wittgenstein.; August 15, 2010 at 11:52 PM
Thomas Haller Buchanan said...: Daniel, why was it blasted? Does that mean it hasn't been seen since then? Was't Cohen a philosopher?; August 16, 2010 at 8:04 AM
Daniel [oeconomist.com] said...: There was no movie Escape the Cavern of Socrates.

Plato (in Republic) has Socrates tell a story of a cave in which people are held prisoner, and kept from anything but seeing shadows of whatever is actually going-on. This is a metaphor for the epistemological problem of relating experience to reälity.

Cohen, Popper, and Wittgenstein were all very influential and fashionable philosophers, concerned with that problem, at about the time that that still was taken. (Each remains very worth reading, though I don't think that Cohen exerts much-if-any continued influence.); August 16, 2010 at 5:28 PM
Steve Scott said...: I think Stan Laurel said it best: "You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead."; August 16, 2010 at 7:37 PM