The problem with these British Philosophical Association Conventions isn’t the boredom, although God knows (and I use the term idiomatically, not as an expression of belief) we’ve got that by the pallet-load. You try sitting through monographs such as Aristotle and the Perceptible Qualities of Causality, or Stebbing’s Rejoinder to Eddington’s Reply to Her Rebuttal read aloud without stifling a yawn — bet you £2 you can’t do it.
Worst of all are the chalky pedagogues who can’t fold an umbrella properly who try to tart up their dry-as-dust white papers to make them . . . relevant: Plato’s Republic and The Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb”: Road Map to Anti-Feminist Authoritarianism?” That sort of twaddle.
No, it’s the informal sessions after the plenary sessions when we all repair to the local pub to relieve our befogged brains. Get a couple pints in your belly and the one-ups-manship begins:
“My paper’s been cited in more peer-reviewed journals than yours.”
“I missed it — but then I don’t subscribe to Rat-Catchers Quarterly.”
Pretty soon come the wagers — “I’ll bet you can’t name the three sons Socrates had by Xanthippe.” Then the dares: “If you love Immanuel Kant so much — why don’t you get him tattooed on your bicep?”
It’s at that point that I normally beg off — me sainted mum would rise from her grave and hunt me down like a zombie if she learned I’d defaced my body in that fashion. But I’ve got to think of my future in academia; if you want to be “one of the boys” in philosophy it’s more or less a given that you’ve got to get “inked.” It’s a rite of passage recognized in numerous sectors of British life, from the Royal Navy to Manchester United fans.
So when Alastair Ponsby-Britt, Associate Professor of Phenomenology at West Warwickshire U., grabbed me by the elbow and said “C’mon mate, give ‘er a go for once,” I reluctantly went along to Indelible Atrocity, a seedy little shop in Hounslow. “They’re clean as a whistle, and they have an entire catalogue of philosophical tattoos to choose from,” he assured me.
While I’ve had my doubts over the years about Alastair’s ability to reason deductively, I had to admit he was right this time.
“Take a look, let me know if anything strikes your fancy,” the proprietor said as he pushed his sample book across the counter. “I’m guessing you’re . . . an empiricist?”
“How’d you know?”
“That reversible jacket — it fits you out for whatever weather you may experience, regardless of the accuracy of the forecast you may have heard.”
I made a little moue at Alastair, as if to say — this guy’s good.
“Last time I was here I started a contemporary British philosophy string up my back,” Alastair said. He lifted up his shirt to show me “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent — Wittgenstein.”
I flipped through the guy’s designs and didn’t see anything that struck my fancy at first. There was the usual middle-brow rubbish: Descartes’ “I think — therefore I am,” the philosophical equivalent of “Mom.” There was the lurid stuff that appeals to undergraduates — a garish Zarathustra with flames coming out of his turban, Arthur Schopenhauer over the motto “Have a terrible day!” I was looking for something that would stand the test of time, however; if you’re going to do something really stupid when you’re drunk, you should do it with unimpeachable taste.
“Do you do special requests?” I asked the owner.
“That’ll cost you extra,” he said. “Whadda ya want?”
“I’m thinking about something by J.L. Austin.”
“The White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford?”
“On the nosey.”
The guy put his hand to his chin and looked up at the fluorescent light fixture on the ceiling, as if calculating his fixed and variable costs and adding an unreasonable profit. “That’s gonna run you at least . . . £300.”
“Oh, go on then!” Alastair interjected. “For a guy who’s just the leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy?”
“That’s all right,” I said, patting Alastair on the wrist to calm him down. Didn’t want him to bust up the man’s shop over a purely pecuniary point.
“What’s your favorite Austin quip,” the tattooist asked, “and don’t tell me it’s ‘How to do things with words.”
“Well, ‘There’s a bittern at the bottom of the garden’ is always an ice-breaker at your nicer cocktail parties and ‘Pamper Our Pets’ shows at Ascot.”
“Can’t go wrong there.”
“But I think my favorite is . . .”
“Yes?” he asked as readied his tattoo gun.
“To pretend to behave vulgarly is, alas, to behave vulgarly.”
Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “Let’s Get Philosophical.”