Will the Post-Talk Cake Be Gluten Free? George Marshall wins prize competition
The prize competition on the question ‘Will the post-talk cake be gluten-free?’ has ended and we have a winner: George Marshall. The competition was launched at the Philosophy Department welcome event, when this question was posed by an audience member.
Sadly, there was to be no post-talk cake. But happily, the absence of cake transformed a dietary enquiry into a philosophical question—up there with ‘Is the King of France bald?’ and ‘How tall is the Golden Mountain?’
A prize of £20 and a bottle of wine was offered for the best student answer to this philosophical conundrum.
Here is George Marshall’s excellent winning answer:
Will the Post-Talk Cake Be Gluten Free?
In addressing this question I will try to affirm both the ontological facticity of the cake and its gluten free nature. In conducting my brief argument I will challenge the notion that the perceived absence of the cake by observers present at the Philosophy Department Welcome Event constitutes sufficient disconfirmation of the cake’s existence. Furthermore, once exposed, the error inherent to that assumption provides a context through which we can come to understand how the cake WILL be made manifest in reality.
The assumption by most attendees that the post-talk cake had no concrete basis indicates a fatal bias in their empirical epistemology. By automatically privileging the absence of their own sensory experience, these doubters neglected the real motivation underlying their own scepticism. The seemingly ridiculous construction of the question prompts the reader to assume that this glib promise of cake will be subverted for the sake of a joke. They petulantly presuppose that the department would not actually be so generous. However the reflexivity of this expectation reveals only the apathy and institutional dependence of those observers. Any one of them could, post-talk, proceed to their own home or halls of residence, download a gluten free recipe and bake their own post-talk cake. The critical logical omission on the part of these sceptics was the failure to fully interpret the first word of the question: ‘Will’.
Not only does ‘Will’ refer here to the potential future becoming of the cake, it also reflects a significant lack of such among the cake’s doubters. Their instinctual dismissal of the multiplicity of ways in which the cake could be made real stems primarily from their failure to be able to act as free agents – liberated from the false security of the constraining ‘wisdom’ of the collective. However, since I possess such a Will - which Schopenhauer characterises as “Being the one and only thing in itself” and thus the primary thing of substance as metaphysical cause of phenomena - I have signed myself up to the Student’s Guild Baking Society.
In conclusion to my argument: ultimately the cake will indeed come to exist and be gluten free. I will reify the cake myself, free from the twin constraints of doubt and wheat germ. Indeed the phrasing of the question would be better rendered in the imperative as ‘Will! The Post-Talk Cake: Be! (Gluten) Free!’