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Today I sat in on a philosophy seminar at uni (one of those beautiful affairs where one professor gets up and argues for a theory and all the others proceed to tear him apart). The topic was a defence of induction. Two quotes from the proceedings.
[Person 1] “One might be tempted to inductively argue from the sample of this room that all philosophers are men; but one can still conceive of another room full of women philosophers”.
[Person 2] “With pleasure.”[After a debate on what premises of an argument were in question] “One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens”.
I’ve since look this up and discovered that this is actually a quote: ”[...] one philosopher’s modus ponens is another philosopher’s modus tollens.” (H. Putnam, “Realism Without Absolutes,” International Journal for Philosophical Studies, Vol 1(2), p. 180).
[OK I admit—I laughed at both jokes; signs perhaps that I’ve been spending too much time reading philosophy recently…]