Philosophical Easter Eggs

For a research project, I had recently had occasion to extract the examples, thought-experiments, metaphors, from some twenty-thousand philosophical texts. As it’s Easter, I looked up the word ‘egg’ in the examples. Below I’ve collected some of my favourites among these quotes. I’ve illustrated them with an image generating model trained on works from the Rijksmuseum and a collection of hand-curated AI-weirdness. There’s no context to these quotes, theres no purpose to this exercise, I just think they’re neat.

Whether or not to count 1/8 th of an ostrich egg as equivalent to one chicken egg (for the purpose of making ‘One-Bowl Brownies’) is not implicit in the instruction ‘add three eggs’.

A cabbit is allegedly the product of crossbreeding. (I say allegedly because some have claimed the cabbit is, in fact, a physically altered Manx cat.) Take a rabbit ovum, fertilize it in vitro with feline sperm, and implant the fertilized egg in a fecund female rabbit and, with a little patience and far too much federal grant money, one is able to produce a cabbit. “I do not know why you would want one,” writes Stout, for the cabbit is a rather disturbing creature. Featuring the hindquarters of a rabbit, replete with hopping legs and bushy tail, and the head of a cat, the cabbit is what can only be called an “abomination.”

Who murdered Eggs Benedict? Was it Beef Strogonoff? Was it Chicken Cacciatore? Where was Eggs Benedict murdered? Was it in the Bronx? When? At 2:00 A. M. January 24, 1963? Why? Did he squeal? How? With this knife?

Let us take the case of an animal which has all the regular characteristics of a cat except that it alternately gives birth to kittens and lays eggs. Shall we still call this animal a cat?

For instance, it may very well happen that certain individuals, e.g. certain stones or leaves, turn out to be both reddish and greenish, while others, e.g. sand dunes or egg yolks, are not classified at all. In that case, it is recommended that two things be done: (1) introducing a new colour predicate ‘ yellow ‘ by ostensive definition, say with ripe lemons and dunes as paradigms, and (2) extending and stabilizing (1) by setting up the rule ‘ reddish, greenish => yellow’ (if reddish as well as greenish hold of something, yellow, too, shall hold of that same thing).

A drawing of an egg would, if reference to Lord Snow were established, be a perfectly legitimate caricature of him.

The universe e.g. was made out of the cosmic egg, floating in the primeval waters-another symbol of fertility and probably even sexual energy; or it was begotten by an ancestral couple, usually heaven and earth.

(a) Upon observing a single platypus (I’ll call her Paula) lay eggs, we infer that all (female) platypuses lay eggs.

In other words, our is chickens are necessarily informed by ought eggs.