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Daniel Dennett's personal ad
Every year I have my students read Thomas Nagel’s insightful essay, “What is it like to be a bat?” Now I’m looking for a woman who can teach me what it feels like to be a man. I am tall, gregarious, intelligent, sophisticated, and kind. Humans are hard-wired to believe in false deities but we are also hard-wired for love.
Leibniz
SWM, fifties. Interests: practically everything. Hobbies, chatting to princesses, sitting in my armchair & thinking, and neglecting my duties as a historian. Keen on travel to places other than Hanover (which is where I live). Seeking woman who can make me feel what I intellectually believe that this the best of all possible worlds.
These are great! Just to have all the linked material on the same page:
Kant: "SWM, 56, university professor, virgin, just finishing big book, looking for expanded social life. Hobbies include walking around town, starry-sky gazing, rational self-governance. I do not enjoy liars, promise-breakers, dogmatic slumbers, doing the morally right thing (but I do it anyway, out of respect for duty) or travelling. Seeks woman (Konigsberg area, please) for non-exploitative relationship based on mutual respect for our rational natures."
Nietzsche: "SWM, 42, retired academic living on modest pension, some health problems but highly resilient. Handsome in a Teutonic way. Enjoys solitude, walking in the mountains, fate, the French, and opera (Bizet, not Wagner!). Anti-religious (both the church and its poison). Seeks woman willing to will the eternal return of our relationship. No Germans, "free thinkers," Anglophiles, or anti-semites. No permanent mailing address, so please respond to Box #1291."
Socrates: "MWM, age unknown (mature, not elderly), famously ugly but a good talker. I like questions, not answers; reason, not passion; wisdom, not wealth; Euripides, not Aristophanes. Seeks ignorant and irrational woman or handsome youth to do what is wrong. [Note: Nietzsche helped Socrates write this one.]"
Hume: "SWM, age 49, philosopher (unemployed as such, but earn a living other ways), stout Scotsman, sympathetic nature. Ruling passions include literary fame, English history, complex ideas, human nature, and hatred of the a priori. Well-disposed towards dispositions. Seeking woman, forceful and vivacious, who has reason to be the slave of my passions. (With thanks to Mark Engleson for the idea for this one.)"
And here's my own questionable attempt at a Hegel:
"Greetings, and goodbye, but as we part ways, let's please get introduced. My name, insofar as I have one, is Hegel. I'm a complicated fellow; 'there was only one man who understood me, and even he didn't understand me.' I have a love-hate relationship with my career, but overall, it's okay.* I'm married but available (just don't tell my wife), and strictly interested in something no-strings-attached, possibly more."
*Here I'm stealing from Mitch Hedberg.
Jean Paul Sartre:
SWM, age 50. In an open relationship. Hell is other people, but younger women can cheer things up. Into good food and lots of good whiskey and wine. Politically compromised and world class petition signer. You're free to choose me or not and I'm free to choose you or not. If we accept you in the family, I'll pass you on to Simone when I get bored with you. Although I support Simone 100%, be forewarned that I don't do my laundry or wash dishes. I love to travel and I will take you on a trip with me once you become a family member, surely to Italy and maybe even to the USSR.
Robert Brandom;
SWM, age 73. Open to commitments. Must like beards. A lot.
Just a few more…
"I am Schopenhauer. I like poodles, playing the flute, and – you know what? Why bother? It'll only disappoint."
"My name is Spinoza. I'm a big fan of God, and as a corollary, I'm really into Nature. Relationships are not my number one priority; I can't be the adequate cause of your happiness, nor you mine. All the same, if you and I are 'meant' (figuratively speaking!) to be together, I won't object."
"I'm Fichte. I exist – what else do you need?"
I asked AI Chat (not ChatGPT) to generate personal ads of no more than 30 words each by specified philosophers. Only Derrida triggered a response clearly based on the subject, and even then it isn't all that satisfying or funny. It didn't seem to recognize Saul Kripke or Edmund Gettier, and only barely Judith Butler. I decided to step away from the OP instructions to generate the second one here.
Jacques Derrida:
Seeking a deconstructionist partner to challenge norms, explore language and reality, dismantle hierarchies, and uncover hidden complexities. Let's question existing truths, pave the way for new possibilities, and disrupt and reimagine the world together.
Jimi Hendrix:
Experienced guitar god seeks adventurous spirit for mind-blowing jams and cosmic exploration. Let's transcend reality together in an electrifying symphony of love and peace. Are you experienced?
Elizabeth of Bohemia
SWF. Interests: Philosophy, politics, religion and feeling depressed. Seeks man (princes only please) with a view to mind-body interaction and the well-regulated indulgence of virtuous passions. Must enjoy the company of Quakers and tolerate activities of siblings, including piracy, printing, chemistry, soldiering, swearing, philandering, painting, plundering, talking to Leibniz and getting morganatically married, and to help get them out of jail or restore them to royalty when necessary.
Quine:
Academic, Boston area: Seeks woman interested in the aims and claims of regimentation. Will you find value in being my bound variable?
Quine:
Academic, Boston area with a taste for desert landscapes. Seeks woman for the entification that begins at arms length but does not necessarily end there.
JS MILL
Widower , London area with a generous pension from the proceeds of imperial exploitation. Interests: Botany, walking, French culture, left-wing politics, logic and political economy. Seeks partner in the pursuit of happiness in the context of an egalitarian relationship – though obviously you will never measure up to my dear departed wife!
Schopenhauer
Rentier, Frankfurt area., good income. Hobbies: fine dining, denouncing the self-serving charlatans and purveyors of philosophical gobbledegook who refuse to recognise my genius, and throwing old women downstairs. Motto: ‘Harm no-one’. Sexual desires unfortunately determined by an a-temporal choice. Seeks woman for a meaningless relationship which will not succeed in making life tolerable, since the pain of desire will be followed by the boredom of fulfilment.
J L Austin
Intelligence agent, Oxford area. Hobbies: flip put-downs, pig-keeping and starting papers with nested quotations. Seeks woman with an interest in performative acts.
Bertrand Russell
Aristocratic divorcé, Cambridge area. Interests include heraldry, cards, lying Cretans, the class of all classes that are not members of themselves and averting nuclear war. Seeks future ex-wife for open marriage (though it is not okay if you have kids by someone else).
Henry Sidgwick
Academic, Cambridge area. Interests include munching own facial hair while staring at choristers and psychic research. Seeks female companion a) as a ‘beard; b) as a partner in feminist endeavours and c) to console me for the fact that the Cosmos of Duty is reduced to a Chaos. Sisters of future prime ministers preferred.
Wittgenstein
SWM, Cambridge area. Depressed philosopher seeks companion to escape academia, watch movies, and play language games. No more can be said; must remain silent.
Derrida
SWM celebrity grammatologist seeks companion with a differance to deconstruct binary oppositions. Please text interest, but with no narrative. Will respond in all possible ways to text.
Frankfurt
Many reasons to love. No bullshit.
G E Moore
Academic, Cambridge area. Interests include pipe-smoking and the achievement of clarity via endless repetitions and careful distinctions embedded in extremely long paragraphs. Seeks partner in shared project of doing the right thing, that is, maximising the total amount of good in the world (even though we can never know what the right thing is). Please note that goodness is not identical with pleasure and that lasciviousness is absolutely bad. Let me enhance the value of your beauty by perceiving it!
Gilbert Ryle
SWM, retired army officer, Oxford area. Jane Austen enthusiast, but with no inner life. Interest include disparaging foreigners and cultivating links with the Commonwealth. Seeks relationship with no-one, though if it were someone, that someone would be male.
Kant
SWM, Konigsberg. Imperative to find companionship for pure reasons. If you have the inclination, I have the sense of duty.
Socrates
Mature male, Athens area. Hobbies: Accosting passers-by with a view to proving that they know nothing and are leading bad lives, neglecting personal hygiene and drinking without getting drunk. Seeks handsome young man for a wisdom/beauty swap in which I impart my wisdom (namely that I alone know that I know nothing) and he allows me to contemplate his beauty. Wealth and social status a plus.
Marcus Aurelius
Government official, Rome area (though with frequent trips to the Danube). Interests: defending an empire based on slavery, executing German POWs and NOT correcting other people's grammatical mistakes (that would be tactless) but using the relevant expression correctly myself at the earliest opportunity. Seeks relationship with woman even though this cannot add to either her happiness or mine since both are entirely dependent on virtue.
J L Mackie
Australian Academic, Oxford area. Seeks partner for a relationship based the premise that nothing is really wrong. Let us invent our own standards!.
Michael Dummett
Academic Oxford area. Hobbies, combatting racism and writing very thick books with no signposts or subheadings and an inadequate index. Seeks partner. The past is unreal and the future indeterminate. Let's falsify the claim that a love-affair will never be built on this spot!
Plato
Wealthy Greek intellectual seeks companion with perfect form to be his footnote. Hobbies include dialogues, restricting music for soldiers, and trying to escape from this blasted cave.
One more perhaps before we knock off
Iris Murdoch
SWF Oxford area: Interests: committing sins, falling love. saying prayers and joining the Communist Party. Pet peeves: playing cricket, cooking cakes, remembering my childhood and going to the circus. Seeks partner (males preferred but I am wiling to experiment) for bad romance.
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