Philosophical Insight

You've heard of Ockham's Razor.  Now there's VDB's Beard – and more.  Here is a portion of an email I recently received from former Providence student and former Philosophy Foosball Blogmaster Mark Jensen who is presently doing a Master's degree at CMU (published here with Mark's permission):

"We are not obligated to choose between Biola or Calvin. Rather we have a more compelling third option: Providence. Our name is not a coincidence, we really are that good! While Calvin has Plantinga's reformed epistemology and Smith's sympathetic treatment of Derrida; Biola has their rockstar Christian philosophers of religion such as Craig and Moreland who deliver knock-out arguments that demonstrate the reasonableness of theism. Both groups are fine in what they do, but they are no match for our unique school of philosophy. Providence has the subtle and attentive logical principle of van der Breggen's beard, which demands careful reading and careful thinking which always has the question of truth at the forefront. Not only that, we have [Phil] Wiebe's aesthetics of pipe smoking–a favorable alternative to Nietzsche's aesthetization of life–which teaches us to value simple pleasures while maintaining modesty and temperance towards our enjoyment of them. Moreover, we have [Kyle] Derkson's post-Quineian philosophy of language which illustrates how bizarre language can be but that fact is not a sufficient reason to doubt the veracity of language's ability to communicate. And I like watching professional wrestling and reading dead German intellectuals."

More of Mark Jensen's thinking can be found at his blog Dining with the Queen: On Theology. I think Mark Jensen also likes wrestling with and reading the work of live Slovenian philosophers – maybe too much.  Too much or too little, if beards could talk, my beard would say thanks (to Mark, not Slavoj).

VDB