Word: absurdum
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fartio Ad Absurdum...
This totally hot guy in my Philosophy tutorial was talking about the categorical imperative and why Kant was wrong to propose its unconditional supremacy over the hypothetical imperative. He attacked the premise of autonomous will in an argument by reductio ad absurdum, taking it to the Objectionist extreme as put forth by Ayn Rand. I was all, like, impressed, and wanted to show him that I was smart too, so I was about to bring up the need for primary AND secondary laws in a society--and then I farted. Everyone heard me, even the proseminar on Hegel next door...
...course, as a practical matter, we have to send people to prison. So the moral imagination, followed to its logical conclusion, short-circuits, becoming its own reductio ad absurdum. It begins by extending our empathy to Clinton but in the end leaves us weighing his fate without dwelling on his frailty, because if human frailty were an excuse, the streets would be full of robbers...
...summer, with the moguls at the sausage factories sending out a new slice of action salami each week--The Lost World: Jurassic Park, followed by Con Air, Speed 2: Cruise Control, Batman & Robin, Face/Off and Men in Black--the big films look like instant remakes, retreads or reductios ad absurdum of last Friday's film, which wasn't all that hot either. Some of the movies have incidental felicities, and, to abort all suspense right now, Face/Off is damn fine. But in sum, these films offer evidence that the action-adventure has reached a point of exhaustion. Seen...
Considering that Auschwitz is the distillation of all that is evil in mankind, the result is a volume of grotesque moral confusion. The very intent of the book--to bring the Holocaust to seven-year-olds without being depressing--is absurd, and so Celebrations becomes the reductio ad absurdum of this genre of young people's realism: at once confused, dishonest, disturbing and false...