“A jury in San Francisco acquitted a man accused of possessing magic mushrooms after his lawyer successfully argued that he forgot they were in his backpack. “Some people think my argument was unique,” explained the attorney, “but it just seemed logical to me.”
This is an awesome illustration of the intersection of Kant and Wittgenstein. The Kantian part is the idealistic constitution of “possession” by means of remembering the magic mushrooms. (In this case, the subjective destruction of the magic mushrooms by means of forgetting). The Wittgenstinian part is the logical nature of this weird sort of physical demonstration of mentality. That is, the mushrooms’s non-existence being constituted by the hippie’s forgetting he had them is shewn so elegantly, in an almost tailor-made Wittgenstinian sort of logical picture. Hippie with the drugs in his backpack forgets about the drugs and the drugs disappear in the eyes of the law. How cool.
