Wednesday, 28 April 2010

Who's the thinker in the white?

"'Socrates has scored!' cries Michael Palin. 'The Greeks are going mad! Socrates scores, got a beautiful cross from Archimedes. The Germans are disputing it. Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant, via the categorical imperative, is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside.' Not quite as pithy as Ken Wolstenholme's 'they think it's all over', but that was the joke behind Monty Python's philosophers' football match, in which for 89 minutes the players wander around too lost in thought to actually kick the ball. Until, that is, Archimedes has his 'Eureka!' moment. 'The clash of two opposites is the whole point,' former Python Terry Jones tells me. 'You can't think about football too much, you just have to do it.'"
Article in today's Guardian