Philosophers’ Scary Nicknames: A Halloween Game


Happy Halloween, philosofriends! To celebrate, I thought we could come up with scary nicknames for well-known philosophers. But there are some rules on how to do it…

Using only the letters of a philosopher’s name, create a scary or evil-sounding nickname for that philosopher from some of them. You needn’t use all of the letters, and you can use the same letter as many times as you need to. You may add “the” if the nickname calls for it. Bonus points if the nickname is relevant to their ideas. (And don’t be mean.)

Here are some examples:

“Wicked” Henry Sidgwick

Simone “Die More” de Beauvoir

John “No Laws” Rawls

Arthur “The Heart Eater” Schopenhauer

David “Mad Mecha” Chalmers

Susan “The” Wolf

Your turn!


Previous Halloween Posts: “Halloween Costumes of Famous Philosophers,” “Philosophy Horror Films“, “What Philosophical Idea Or Position Do You Find The Scariest?“, “Which Philosophy Ideas Make for Good Costumes?“, “Causes of Deaths of Philosophers

 

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Holger Leuz
Holger Leuz
4 years ago

René “the scare” Descartes

Fawkes
Fawkes
4 years ago

Derek “ID Ripper” Parfit

Eric Jonas
Eric Jonas
4 years ago

Blaise-ing Inferno Pascal

Murali
4 years ago

Robert “The Stick” Nozick

Adam Omelianchuk
Adam Omelianchuk
4 years ago

David “ew” Lewis
Alvin “pan villain” Plantinga
Elizabeth “eat brains” Barnes

Adam Omelianchuk
Adam Omelianchuk
4 years ago

Gabriel “MAGA” Marcel

Olaf
Olaf
4 years ago

Maurice “The Paranormal” Merleau-Ponty

The Doctor
The Doctor
4 years ago

Thomas “The Beast” Hobbes
Christine “The Anti-Christ”Korsgaard
or
Christine “Dragon Rider” Korsgaard
Donald “The Villain” Davidson
David “Barn Invader” Benatar
Ronald “Old Dark Warrior” Dworkin

Mark Dimick
Mark Dimick
4 years ago

“Ax go on Rosa’s ox” -Anaxagoras

Mario M.
Mario M.
4 years ago

Thomas Samuel “The Klone” Kuhn

Curtis Franks
Reply to  Mario M.
4 years ago

Unrelated to Halloween, but surely it is no coincidence that Thomas Samuel Kuhn is just one vowel away from being a perfect anagram of “The hokum salesman,” which I think is how Errol Morris referred to him. (the != thu)

Curtis Franks
4 years ago

Curtis Daniel Franks: “Darker Sinful Antics”

Anthony
Anthony
4 years ago

David BOOnin

(Not sure this counts)

Alan White
4 years ago

Alfred North “Halloween” Whitehead
or
Alfred North “Dread the Dead” Whitehead
wherein even the “the” is prehended by his name.

Stephen John
Stephen John
4 years ago

Early-modern ‘meany’ empiricists
Including
John ‘neck lock’ Locke
Bishop George ‘killer’ Berkeley
And
David ‘die! Die!’ Hume

Tim Maudlin
4 years ago

Immanuel. “I’m a mean Kult” Kant

Tim O'Keefe
4 years ago

“I curse” Epicurus
“The Ulcer” Lucretius
“It Rots” Aristotle
“Cruel Samurai” Marcus Aurelius

Peter Kalef
Peter Kalef
4 years ago

Not very scary, but here are some ancient ones:

‘Creator’ [of philosophy as we know it] Socrates
‘Too Tall’ Plato [apparently, he was quite physically imposing]
Aristotle ‘Tries a Lot’ [an exact anagram, and a reference to the fact that his approach was more empirical than Plato’s]

Here are some more for the most famous continental ‘rationalists’:
Rene ‘Entranced’ Descartes
Bento ‘Oneness’ de Spinoza
Gottfried Wilhelm ‘The Mind of God’ Leibniz

dear god please don't reveal my name
dear god please don't reveal my name
4 years ago

Timothy ‘Showman’ Williamson
Martha ‘Subhuman’ Nussbaum
Ted ‘The Desert’ Sider
Christine ‘The Chantress’ Korsgaard
Seana ‘Sniffiness’ Shiffrin
Tim ‘The Militiaman’ Maudlin
Kit ‘The Knife’ Fine
Aristotle The Totaliser

No one
No one
4 years ago

Weird Justin Weinberg

Mark
Mark
4 years ago

Since it’s no longer Halloween I’m assuming that the rules are less strictly enforced, so I wonder if I can get away with:

A.J. Scare (proponent of the “BOO hurrah” theory of ethics)

Anco
4 years ago

Can’t believe no one mentioned Jeremy “Headless” Bentham!

Spencer Jay Case
Spencer Jay Case
4 years ago

Saul Cryptke