Solution to Puzzle #13:                                                                                           Español

We received correct solutions from Frank Scalambrino (USA) and Eduardo Rojas (Peru).

The four philosophers are: Friedrich Nietzsche, Zeno, David Hume, and Henri Bergson.

A Frenchman (Bergson), a Scottish man (Hume), a German (Nietzsche), and a Greek (Zeno) meet at the horse-races. They start talking, and soon they discover that they are all famous philosophers, dead now, who came down from heaven to have a bit of fun on earth. They sit down, waiting for the race to begin.

Suddenly, the first philosopher (Nietzsche) stands up and says: “I don’t feel like waiting. I’ll watch this race in the future. After all, anything that happens once will happen again and again and again, for eternity.”

The second philosopher (Zeno) stands up too and says: “I’m coming with you. There is nothing to wait for. Nobody will win and nobody will lose. Movement is an illusion, time is an illusion, and nobody can pass anybody else.”

The two philosophers start walking towards the gate.

The third philosopher (Hume) jumps up and says: “Wait, I am coming with you! This race is boring – the results are obvious in advance. Look, one horse is healthy, all the rest are sick. Healthy horses always beat sick horses, throughout history, with perfect regularity.” He hesitates, then murmurs to himself: “On the other hand, you can’t prove that a regularity in the past must continue into the future.” After some hesitation, he joins the other two.

Only the fourth philosopher (Bergson) remains sitting. “I am staying,” he says. “Nothing repeat itself, every event is new. Time is creative – unless you are obsessed with mathematics and think that time is a mathematical dimension.”