Is it just me? "The University of Coimbra had pronounced that the sight of a few people ceremoniously burned alive before a slow fire was an infallible prescription for preventing earthquakes..." (page 37) Or is that not messed up? I don't think it is. But you be the judge. Don't get scared by these things that Voltaire says, he only means them in extreme cases. Just to give you a clue, its called satire...still don't know? Google it.
"He wanted to throw himself into the sea after the Anabaptist, but the great philosopher, Pangloss, stopped him by proving that Lisbon harbour was made on puropse for this Anabaptist to drown there," (page 33) "all is for the best" and "there is no cause without effect." Hmmm...who could that possibly be? Surely not Voltaire, c'mon. I mean, that doesn't sound familiar at all. Notice that this guy we don't know about, sometimes named "narrator" pauses the sentence and specifies, "...the great philosopher, Pangloss..." If you haven't got it yet, he's making fun of poor old Pangloss. Man, can satire be tricky.
They say great minds think alike, well not in my case. Voltaire and I don't get along very well, but when we do, we do it big time. Although I have got to admit that the message is pretty clear. It is a critique against society. Though what I have come to understand through these clue-sentences is that there is so much more out there that we don't know of and it takes a lot more than just to name ourselves philosophers, to actually know.
Taking into account that Voltaire does make fun of philosophers and questions their position, that leads me to think: are philosophers a joke?
If this is so, aren't we philosophers?
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