In Competition No. 3314, you were invited to submit clerihews (two couplets, AABB, metrically clunky, humorous in tone) on well-known philosophers.

Eric Idle’s ‘Bruces’ Philosophers Song’ cast a long shadow over a large and jolly postbag. ‘Extraordinarily hard to avoid couplets from the Monty Python song!’ wrote A.H. Harker in a note accompanying his entry.Brian Murdoch was thinking along the same lines, as were R.M. Goddard and Nick MacKinnon: ‘We petty clerihewers can only peep about beneath the huge legs of Eric Idle…’ An honourable mention, nonetheless, to Matt Quinn, Donald Mack and Anthony Stadlen, and £8 each to the winners below.

Friedrich Nietzsche,

Emerging glumly from a monster movie double feature,

Said,

‘Godzilla is dead.’

Chris O’Carroll

Jean-Paul Sartre

Inspired Frank Sinatra.

That’s surely why La Nausée

Permeates ‘My Way’.

W.J. Webster

Proudhon

Proved a dude on

The ultra-left,

Claiming that property is theft.

Schopenhauer

Went sour

On Kant.

‘Optimism, Schmoptimism!’ he’d rant.

Basil Ransome-Davies

Bertrand Russell

fought a lifelong tussle

with the unexamined lives

of other mens’ wives.

Nick MacKinnon

Bishop George Berkeley

Saw through a glass derkeley:

‘Esse is percipi.’

There speaks an old hipi.

Bill Greenwell

Plato

Considered his baked potato

Less as a meal

Than as an inadequate version of an ideal.

George Simmers

Nietzsche

Rants like a preacher.

Odd,

Given his take on God.

Alex Steelsmith

Descartes

Had to start

By proving he existed.

(His phone number must not have been listed.)

Max Gutmann

Socrates

didn’t think life was a breeze.

The unexamined life was not worth

birth.

D.A. Prince

Zeno

Enjoyed reading the Beano,

Which, even in a relativistic continuum without universal clocks,

Is a paradox.

Frank Upton

Wittgenstein

Said ‘It was no fault of mine

That when I was littler

I was at school with Hitler.’

Brian Murdoch

Ayn Rand

Didn’t give a helping hand;

Liberty

Just meant me, me, me.

Nicholas Hodgson

Thomas Aquinas

In his Summa Theologiae sought to assign us

Proofs of God’s existence.

But God put up resistance.

Frank McDonald

Jean-Paul Sartre

Had nothing in common with Frank Sinatra.

Whereas the former believed that to do is to be, the latter knew

Only ‘Dooby dooby doo.’

Nicholas Holbrook

Albert Camus,

entre nous,

was at his best

in La Peste.

Martin Parker

Friedrich Nietzsche’s

philosophy features

Superman, by which he meant

the Übermensch – and not Clark Kent.

Robert Schechter

Jean-Paul Sartre

Orders latte in Montmartre.

He gets nausea from espresso –

Simone de Beauvoir, less so.

David Silverman

Plato

Never ate potato

He much preferred tomāto

Like Cāto.

Sarah Harris

No. 3317: Weather warning

Elmore Leonard advised writers: ‘Never open a book with weather.’ You are invited to provide the opening to a novel that bears out this advice. Please email entries of up to 150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 13 September.