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”
René “the scare” Descartes
Derek “ID Ripper” Parfit
Blaise-ing Inferno Pascal
Sorry Eric, but this doesn’t follow the rules of the game. No candy for you!
Robert “The Stick” Nozick
David “ew” Lewis
Alvin “pan villain” Plantinga
Elizabeth “eat brains” Barnes
Gabriel “MAGA” Marcel
Maurice “The Paranormal” Merleau-Ponty
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
Friedrich “Sinner-in-Chief” Nietzsche
“Ax go on Rosa’s ox” -Anaxagoras
Thomas Samuel “The Klone” Kuhn
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 Daniel Franks: “Darker Sinful Antics”
David BOOnin
(Not sure this counts)
Alfred North “Halloween” Whitehead
or
Alfred North “Dread the Dead” Whitehead
wherein even the “the” is prehended by his name.
Early-modern ‘meany’ empiricists
Including
John ‘neck lock’ Locke
Bishop George ‘killer’ Berkeley
And
David ‘die! Die!’ Hume
Immanuel. “I’m a mean Kult” Kant
“I curse” Epicurus
“The Ulcer” Lucretius
“It Rots” Aristotle
“Cruel Samurai” Marcus Aurelius
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
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
Weird Justin Weinberg
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)
Can’t believe no one mentioned Jeremy “Headless” Bentham!
Saul Cryptke