Spectator competition winners: Clerihews on well-known philosophers

In Competition No. 3314, you were invited to submit clerihews (two couplets, AABB, metrically clunky, humorous in tone) on well-known philosophers.

Eric Idle’s ‘Bruces’ Philosophers Song’ cast a long shadow over a large and jolly postbag. ‘Extraordinarily hard to avoid couplets from the Monty Python song!’ wrote A.H. Harker in a note accompanying his entry.Brian Murdoch was thinking along the same lines, as were R.M. Goddard and Nick MacKinnon: ‘We petty clerihewers can only peep about beneath the huge legs of Eric Idle…’ An honourable mention, nonetheless, to Matt Quinn, Donald Mack and Anthony Stadlen, and £8 each to the winners below.

Friedrich Nietzsche,

Emerging glumly from a monster movie double feature,

Said,

‘Godzilla is dead.’

Chris O’Carroll

Jean-Paul Sartre

Inspired Frank Sinatra.

That’s surely why La Nausée

Permeates ‘My Way’.

W.J. Webster

Proudhon

Proved a dude on

The ultra-left,

Claiming that property is theft.

Schopenhauer

Went sour

On Kant.

‘Optimism, Schmoptimism!’ he’d rant.

Basil Ransome-Davies

Bertrand Russell

fought a lifelong tussle

with the unexamined lives

of other mens’ wives.

Nick MacKinnon

Bishop George Berkeley

Saw through a glass derkeley:

‘Esse is percipi.’

There speaks an old hipi.

Bill Greenwell

Plato

Considered his baked potato

Less as a meal

Than as an inadequate version of an ideal.

George Simmers

Nietzsche

Rants like a preacher.

Odd,

Given his take on God.

Alex Steelsmith

Descartes

Had to start

By proving he existed.

(His phone number must not have been listed.)

Max Gutmann

Socrates

didn’t think life was a breeze.

The unexamined life was not worth

birth.

D.A. Prince

Zeno

Enjoyed reading the Beano,

Which, even in a relativistic continuum without universal clocks,

Is a paradox.

Frank Upton

Wittgenstein

Said ‘It was no fault of mine

That when I was littler

I was at school with Hitler.’

Brian Murdoch

Ayn Rand

Didn’t give a helping hand;

Liberty

Just meant me, me, me.

Nicholas Hodgson

Thomas Aquinas

In his Summa Theologiae sought to assign us

Proofs of God’s existence.

But God put up resistance.

Frank McDonald

Jean-Paul Sartre

Had nothing in common with Frank Sinatra.

Whereas the former believed that to do is to be, the latter knew

Only ‘Dooby dooby doo.’

Nicholas Holbrook