Cocke Hall is a tough place to be a chair.
In most buildings, the job's not so bad. You plunk yourself down on one side of the room, wait for a body to plunk down on you and for the next 50 minutes, just hang out right there. You might have to weather some minor maltreatment -- foot-tapping or gum-depositing, a tilt to your hind legs -- but for the most part, you can simply sit pretty.
In Cocke, you'd better be ready to, well, stand up for yourself.
That building is home to the philosophy department, where a chair is anything but just a chair. There, the humble seat has been drawn into all sorts of thorny debates about existence, extension, experience, modality, skepticism, truth, possibly even ethics. It's become, to Cocke Hall, what Drosophila is to Gilmer: the default system for generalized inquiry. It's not that there's anything peculiarly philosophical about chairs (I don't think). They're mostly solid, everyday, physical objects. Strangely enough, that's often what philosophers need to get going. "Give me a chair and a firm place to put it," they'll say, "and I'll move the world." Such is the power of creative reason.
For instance: Give a chair to one particular University philosophy professor -- one of the cleverest and quickest wits in any department -- and he'll make it disappear. Actually, he might not take it in the first place. "What chair?" he'll say. In his ontology, there are no chairs. There are no newspapers or marshmallow Peeps or asteroids either. There are only atoms arranged chair-wise (or paper-wise or Peep-wise). "What's the difference?" you might ask, if you're not up on the current controversies of mereology. Turns out, there's a sizeable difference indeed, and this man's theory is one of the smartest around. He's published a whole book on the topic, and -- take my word (and object! Eek, bad philosophy pun) -- it's a far sounder case than you might imagine. Guess what four-legged object graces the cover.
Of course, there are chairs in Cocke Hall, according to some other folks. "There's one there, you see?" you may hear from another University philosophy professor. This one periodically teaches a course on the Rationalists, that acclaimed early-modern trio of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Objects gave them grief too. Yes, you see the chair, the instructor will note, but can you really know that it's there? Not if you're Descartes. You might be dreaming of chairs. You might be deceived by a chair-loving demon. You might be a chair. Once again, it's devilishly tough to argue your way out. (Incidentally, were I a chair, I might want to be a Cocke Hall specimen after all. They're brand-new and gorgeous -- wooden, polished and University seal-engraved.)
A surprising lot of things might be chairs, and chairs might be lots of things. There is a third University philosophy professor to consult on this point. A chair might be the null set, he'll point out. A perfectly reasonable definition of "null set" is "contains no members," and chairs fit that bill. In fact, you or I might be the null set, even if we determine we're not chairs. If you're tempted to scoff, note that set theorists themselves haven't completely settled the issue. But don't take it too seriously, either. You can run into trouble pressing questions too far, as he might warn you next. You can start by innocently asking, "Is this a chair?" and all too quickly end up wailing, "Chair! Chair! What is a chair to begin with?"
It's a complicated matter, being a chair (though the particular question of "being a chair" might be too Continental for the ones in Cocke Hall). You're best keeping clear of inquisitive people -- rough advice in these parts. At the very least, avoid philosophers.
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