A Refutation

I always liked the story about Samuel Johnson and the Platonic world of ideals.  Boswell says he can’t refute the claim of Bishop Berkeley that what we sense is not real, only ideals are real.  So Johnson delivers a swift kick to a stone saying “I refute it thus!”  There is a story about Diogenes where he wants to give a Diogenean response to a definition of man as a “featherless biped” made by Plato.  Diogenes carried a plucked chicken to the Academy and said “Here is Plato’s Man!”