a tumblr of Soma

Immanuel Kant was apparently famous for his dinner-parties. In his Anthropology Kant gives explicit advice for a dinner-party (and claims that it’s a bad idea for philosophers always to eat alone):

There should be no more than nine and no less than three guests, and the dinner-party should go through exactly three stages, in exactly this order:

1. Narration, in which you talk about the news of the day (he gives a set of rules to follow for deciding the topics to discuss);
2. Argument, in which people begin to argue their different views about the news, which stirs up the appetite for food and drink; and
3. Humor, because people begin to get tired of arguing, you should end with jesting and wit, which should preferably lead to loud, good-natured laughter, because that’s good for the digestion. Unfortunately, the German philosopher does not give us examples of the sort of jokes you should be telling at a dinner-party.