September 25, 2013

Horse 1544a - Ezekiel Bulver (Additional)

The previous post was a fabrication; a fib; a lie. There is of course no Ezekiel Bulver and I'm not sure I would wish to have met him either. He is an invention of CS from an essay published in 1944. A further explanation follows.

You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it "Bulverism". Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver.
- CS Lewis, "Bulverism" from pp.16-20— Undeceptions No. 2 (June 1944)

Full text can be found here: Link - God In The Dock

Mr Lewis never wrote the biography of the imaginary inventor of the eponymous Bulverism. So why did I? Because there is an advert on a lamppost near where I work for a Bowdlerised production of Hamlet and I'd mistaken the two. Thomas Bowdler was a real person though.

Scheduled at 10pm AEST.

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