Ayn Clouter's Blog

KNOW THYSELF:
AWolf of alone points to this Ethical Philosophy Selector, purporting to tell whose views you are closest to. My score on this quiz was no surprise:

Your Results:
1. Thomas Hobbes (100%)
2. Nietzsche (92%)
3. Jean-Paul Sartre (79%)

I was delighted to see the first two, at least as those two thinkers are usually pictured, and this quiz seems to follow the conventional wisdom. But that third one -- Sartre? That existentialist communist? Either this part of the quiz is nonsense, or as Rick Blaine said about the waters in Casablanca, "I was misinformed."

I tried again, out of curiosity, to see what the quiz would say if answered the way a typical fuzzy-brained liberal would. And the winner was:

Your Results:
1. Nel Noddings (100%)

She is a "philosopher of education and feminist ethics" and a former professor at Stanford, who "has raised 'a flock of kids' (10 to be exact) and stayed married to the same man for 48 years." Well, at least that tells me whose works to stay away from. This article about her does cite one point I agree with her on:

Academics sometimes remind her of a man psychologist Carl Jung once described: Upon hearing suspicious noises from the cellar, he rushed to the attic. Finding nothing unusual there, he assumed the grumblings were his imagination.

That reminded me of a cold scalpel applied to one philosopher by cartoonist Jeff Jones in an episode of his comic Idyl. It was titled "Aristotle". A woman walking finds two large oil cans. She says "Barrels! I wonder if there's anything in them." She lifts the lid off one and says "Nothing in this one." And in the last panel she just walks away, leaving the other barrel untouched.