(You have no choice but to) Consider the Philosopher

So what exactly would it take to redeem the Times magazine from all those dreadful "Ethicist" and "Questions For..." columns (and get me blogging again in the process)? The list of things is quite short, but you'd better believe an essay about David Foster Wallace's undergraduate thesis on fatalism is near the top.

For what it's worth, trying to make a convincing argument for fatalism via semantics seems like a poor idea to begin with, so I'm not surprised that Foster Wallace was able to demonstrate how such an argument is flawed. And Foster Wallace doesn't weigh in on whether fatalism holds true in general, just on that specific argument for it.

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