![[Philosophers]](http://wearehugh.com/public/2008/06/philosophers.png "True story: I decided to become a philosophy major while sitting on Libe Slope at Cornell, looking up at the clouds")
(with apologies to Randall Munroe; bubble from Open Clip Art)
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You’ve left out an O.
— Eli 
Other than the typo in one of the eight words you had to type… well done ;)
Don’t mind the typo ; along with the uppercase it gives the whole addition a lolcat feel I like very much !
— cstar
philosphers = philosopher’s phosphor?
Excellence.
This is awesomely meta. Reminds me of the Sagan Planet Walk in downtown Ithaca (which I think postdates your Cornell years slightly). Using their scale, Alpha Centauri would be on Hawaii.
— Mark Siegal
All right, all right, I fixed the damn typo.
— Mark
http://digg.com/odd_stuff/xkcd_Purity?t=15998085#c15998085
You stole this from Digg ;/
— foo
Is philosophy really more pure than pure maths?
— Anonymous
Isn’t mathematics applied logic?
Logic, of course, is applied analytic philosophy…
@foo: I really didn’t. Great minds think alike, or something like that. (In the case of philosophers, great minds think alike but will argue to the death that they think differently.)
— Mark
Mathematics is not philosophy; mathematics is real. Being a philosopher is a psychological disorder, similar to narcissistic personality disorder.
@MarkH: Now now, logical rudeness will not be tolerated. Thinking is not a disease.
— Mark
@Joseph Hertzlinger: Yes and no. Almost all arguments you will read or hear from mathematicians are informal arguments given in the mathematician’s natural language. i.e. almost nobody uses formal logic. Also, if I remember right, all of mathematics, or at least the foundational parts of it, haven’t been formalized either.
But in generally, yes, the arguments are logically sound, and follow various patterns you might study in a intro to logic class.
— Chris
Things in mathematics can be *proved*. Things in philosophy can only be argued and agreed or disagreed upon. Therefore I would argue that it should be considered to be on the far *left* of that graph.
— Stephen
Stephen, they can only be “proved” within the context of an axiomatic system.
Now see, I’d always thought of the mathematician and the philosopher as being engaged in a footrace to the right-hand-side: competing to see who can move farther away from practical applications the fastest.
Thank you!!! :)
— Chris
@Stephen, @Noah: And of course, mathematicians can (and do) argue to death about the merits of different axiomatic systems, just like philosophers. I agree with Joseph on this; “applied philosophy” is a good approximate definition of math.
@Michael: I’m afraid the mathematicians lose big-time on that one. Society, with help from the damn engineers, has been pretty successful in finding useful applications for almost anything math guys came with (Boolean algebra anyone?). Philosophy, in the meanwhile, is still a safe haven from utilitarism. Except for utilitarians.
faint busillis?
— teg
Wikipedia currently says:
“Often philosophy is seen as an investigation into an area not sufficiently well understood to be its own branch of knowledge. What were once philosophical pursuits have evolved into the modern day fields such as psychology, sociology, linguistics, and economics, for example.”
Philosophy is the line.
— Daniel
Three cheers for Daniel’s definition. I’ve actually TA’ed an intro to philosophy course where the professor gave much the same definition for philosophy on the first day. Her version was something like: “philosophy is the study of problems that we have not yet found any settled way to study.” No definitions are perfect, but that one comes about as close as any.
— Justin
The answer, musically, on Sociology and Mathematics was given 30 years ago by Tom Lehrer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX5II-BJ8hI
— Jim Deming
@leonardo – it’s one of my favorite images of ‘purist’ mathematicians – that moment of frustration when the arcane mathematical plaything they’d come up with is found to have an application.
> Philosophy is the line.
Well put!
There appears to be a problem with the link to the butler script in the greasemonkey book. … never mind, just another case of UBD (User Brain Damage). Found the script, and I’m excited about working my way through the book.
— mcintosh@triad.rr.com
My little contribute :)
http://www.lucianogiustini.org/english/archives/2008/06/dive_into_xkcd.shtml
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim