A philosophy webcomic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also Jokes

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Philosophy in a Foxhole



The foxhole reveals who you truly are, and some people just are that big of nerds it turns out.

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Both Ludwig Wittgenstein and JRR Tolkien supposedly wrote large amounts of works that would go on to have enormous impact on the 20th century while in opposite trenches in World War I. The works themselves were quite opposite too, Wittgenstein, writing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus would sow the seeds of the most scientific, rational, and empirically focused philosophical movement in history, the logical positivists. They believed that any sentence which did not directly correspond to empirically observable facts in the world was senseless, and quite literally without meaning.

Tolkien, on the other hand, began his dreaming of a fantasy world that would form the basis for all fantasy worlds for the next hundred years at least. Being a philologist, he started in a strange place: the languages. The world itself, he claimed, was just a setting for them to exist in, because the languages were his real love. Like the comic shows, he went through extraordinary effort to construct realistic, living languages, even with a history and lengthy explanations of shifting pronunciations, such as the drop of the trilled r, that left legacies in the spelling. As an aside, the specific example is a bit amusing, because of course the elves of the First Age when everyone was still trilling their r's (only when preceding a vowel, naturally, mirroring Tolkien's own non-rhotic accent), were still very much alive. So it seems as though you would be able to tell the age of any given elf by how they pronounced the letter r, a detail which Peter Jackson unfortunately left out of the movies (or maybe he did? Galadriel rolls her r's for sure, but I'm not going to rewatch all the movies and note everyone's ages for this. Not to mention in other places Tolkien seems to say all the elves roll their r's. The point is he was a huge nerd, even when in the face of some of the most harrowing experiences anyone on this Earth have ever gone through).

Philosophers in this comic: Ludwig Wittgenstein
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