Timothy Tableau: The Mark Zuckerberg Professor of Philosophy Pete Palu: The Florida Power Professor of Biology They both walked the corridor in their usual manner. They sat in the patio, on the same wooden bench that had been beaten, almost to death, by the violent southern rain. Tableau: You should probably know Zizek, or like him. Read More
Sisyphus takes us back to school – Nigeria and Her Excesses – Marcus Crassus drinks a cup of molten gold – The Mathematical Approximation of Sisyphus’s Dilemma – Epicurus, Orgasm, and his friends. Happiness is expensive. If you don’t believe me, a quick call to a local psychologist will do, your eighty-something year old grandmother Read More
1234 Evening Road, Filaba Trans Company, Zimbabwe Sept. 25, 1959, Professor T. Jones, 315 Borbon Street, University of Trifton. Dear Professor Jones, My name, as you can see, is Mukasa. I am a Mathematician in Zimbabwe; and you can say I am a mathematician by day, a philosopher by night. We met once Read More
Soon, their voices began to percolate through my red old jarrah-wooden door. I changed my sleeping position, rotated 180 degrees away from the door, and threw my cover cloth over my head to see if I could reduce the sound waves from balking my sleep. I failed. I put on my ear plugs, but, gush, Read More
One: Grad School Sounds Easy This semester I served as an ambassador of the Biochemistry Graduate Program at The University of Georgia. We met with a few prospective graduate students at lunch a few weeks ago; and of course, like most graduate student ambassadors, folks always fall into this trap of saying the good stuff. Read More
One: What is True? “To say of what is, that it is; or of what is not, that it is not, is true.” I didn’t say that, Aristotle did, and what do I think? I think that is true. Two: Does Truth Exists? Let’s battle an assumption head-on, if we can define truth, does that Read More
One: Black Professors and Molecular Genetics We do know for a fact that if you are born into a particular race today, at certain places in the world, or even certain places in an extremely tiny country, your chances of success can change dramatically. Given that no one chooses where to be born, I believe, Read More
One: The 2-ways of knowing. Friends permit me to start with Hume’s fork [1]. He pontificated that there are two ways of knowing (justified propositions), 1) ‘matters of facts’, and 2) the ‘relations of ideas’. In the latter, he means logic, mathematics, proof and everything in between – all bachelors are unmarried, that kind of Read More
One: Mr. J I learnt of a story, told to me by a friend, he said he had asked a scientist in his lab – whom we shall call Mr. J. for now – if he believes in anything supernatural or supranatural for that matter. His response was something like I am too smart to Read More
Friends, over the next months, I will be writing a blog series titled ‘Philosophical Morsels’. As the name hints, it’s going to be series of philosophical essays where I will hop around philosophy in it’s two main conceptions. 1) philosophy as a subject matter i.e. what we know that we know, how we know what Read More