Articles

Text: Sabine Winters / Photo by sebastiaan stam on

In everyday life, a certain balance in the ambiguous experience of the body as a subject as well as an object has to be continuously upheld. This balance reveals itself in our both having and being a body. Or, in other words; the body that we have as an object, is at the same time something that we are as a subject. However, Tereza experiences...

Freedom and health are fundamental moral values. But there are other, equally important ones. In the course of history many people gave their lives for the value of equality and the idea of a just society and were willing to risk the lives of other people in their pursuit for attaining it. Can we blame them for taking such risks?

When compared to scientific progress as well as other kinds of inquiry, the nature of philosophical progress is different because of a lacking structural methodological process. Williamson argues that in order to make philosophical progress, we should make clear our philosophical intuitions by adopting a methodology that largely depends on mathematics, “one that prizes clarity, rigor, and open-eyed reflection on the sorts of constraints – including logical constraints – that should be held to fix the contours of the debate.”

A plethora of problems arises when relating mathematics to the natural world; imperfect models, observational noise, false negatives and positives, uncertainty of the initial condition, etc. All those problems allow for uncertainty and an exponential growth of that uncertainty over time, debilitating any predictive power. However, the most important problem is not one regarding prediction but one about representing reality.

This work was submitted by Pieter Booij. The opinions and

You think about yourself as a unique individual, you experience yourself and your body as a whole. You have one name, but you should actually have many names. You are not one, you are an exuberant ever-changing crowd, a planet swarming with life, a symbiotic microbiome full of millions of micro-organisms that perform various, indispensable functions in your body. In fact, you are innumerable, always a 'we' and never merely an 'I'.

As a philosopher, Pieter Booij specializes in logic and the foundations of mathematics. In the next four short essays Pieter will interpret a selection of Wittgensteins aphorisms in the context of the Corona pandemic. Wittgensteins second masterpiece is the Philosophical Investigations, which consists of a collection of aphorisms. These aphorisms read like poetry to Pieter, and like poetry, they are not only open to interpretation, but it are intentionally meant to be interpreted.