Monday, March 28, 2005

On Sorcery

There has been a proposal, to be found over at Doing Things With Words, that the entire discipline of Philosophy be renamed Sorcery. Now, am not so sure about that, but I do quite enjoy one of the implications which would be the replacement of the world 'philosophy' with the word 'sorcery' (and its vice versa, the replacement of 'sorcery' with 'philosophy').

This would result in having to retitle a great many books, a point that has already been vaguely recognised, with suggestions of Russell's The Problems of Sorcery and Wittgenstein's Sorcerous Investigations. But why stop there ...

I would like to set down a challenge to see how many titles we can rename simply by replacing 'philosophy' with 'scorcery' and their varients. I suggest, to commence

Boethius, The Consolation of Sorcery (and by implication De Botton, The Consolations of Sorcery)
Derrida, Margins of Sorcery
Hegel, The Sorcery of Right
Hume, Sorcerous Essays Concerning Human Understanding (using the early title of the Enquiry)
Russell, History of Western Sorcery
Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Sorcerous

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