Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

The Scientist and the Savage

A dialogue by Mike Fuller.

SCIENTIST: Look here, my passion for the truth forces me to try and convince you of the error of your ways: the earth is not flat!

SAVAGE: (shrugs) Perhaps for your tribe it is not flat, as you say. But my tribe have always believed it so, and it has always served our purposes very well to believe it so. Why quarrel about it?

SCIENTIST: But if you started walking, from where you stand now, in a straight line, over the land and the ocean, you would return to the same spot you started from, because the earth is round, I assure you! Now there’s an objective, conclusive experiment for you!

SAVAGE: Huh …. I would have to be some big fool to play such a silly game. We have better things to do with our time around here.

…