From Lewis Carroll’s A Tangled Tale: The governor of Kgovjni gives a dinner party for his father’s brother-in-law, his brother’s father-in-law, his father-in-law’s brother, and his brother-in-law’s father — and invites a single person:

Males are denoted by capitals, females by small letters. The governor is E, and his guest is C.

See “Proof That a Man Can Be His Own Grandfather,” No Reunion, and The Half-Bastard.

Relativism either applies to itself or it doesn’t.

If it does, then it’s only relatively true.

If it doesn’t, then there’s an absolute truth.

If the moon orbits the earth, always presenting the same face to us, does it rotate on its own axis?

It seems a simple question, but its appearance in the London Times in April 1856 set off a war among the English intelligentsia:

• “A ship sailing round the world presents to the fishes always the same face as the Moon does to us. Coming home again, it will surely not be said that the ship has performed a [rotation].”
• “Let him perforate a small ivory ball to represent the Moon, pass a wire through it, and bend this wire into a circle of a foot in diameter, and then push the ball round the circumference. Will there then remain any doubt of her not rotating on her axis?”

The answer, as William James would note in his parable of the squirrel, is that “which party is right depends on what you practically mean” by the term in question. Today we’d say that the moon rotates about its axis in the same time it takes to orbit the earth.

Incidentally, Lewis Carroll submitted two letters, but the Times didn’t print them. Perhaps it’s just as well — he was far ahead of everyone else: “I noticed for the first time the fact that though [the moon] only goes 13 times round the earth in the course of the year, it makes 14 revolutions round its own axis, the extra one being due to its motion round the sun.”

‘If a man followed the directions of a street-car company,’ said Jones, ‘he would never enter one of its cars. Once in, paradoxically, he would never leave it. Just read that sign; it says, ‘Passengers are forbidden to enter or leave this car while in motion.’ Now, how in the name of Lindley Murray can a passenger do otherwise than get in motion, while leaving or entering a street car?’

— Marshall Brown, Bulls and Blunders, 1893

A 12th-century version of the liar paradox:

Socrates swears that he will speak only falsehoods about you.

Then he says, “You are a stone.”

This shows that a man can lie and speak the truth at the same time.

Bertrand Russell admired G.E. Moore’s dedication to the truth.

“I have never but once succeeded in making him tell a lie,” he wrote, “and that was by a subterfuge.

“‘Moore,’ I said, ‘do you always speak the truth?’

“‘No,’ he replied.

“I believe this to be the only lie he ever told.”