by Jeroen Bouterse In his Confessions, Augustine remembers his state after the death of a beloved childhood friend. He writes: “Everywhere I looked I saw death. […] My eyes sought him everywhere, and did not see him. I hated all places because he was not in them.” An unfailingly moving passage, and a testament to…

by Jeroen Bouterse I have put off reading G.H. Hardy’s Mathematician’s Apology (1940) to the end for too long. Now that I have, I can say with conviction that if you ever find yourself needing to justify why people should learn at least some mathematics, then this is the text to avoid, and Hardy provides…

by Jeroen Bouterse Preparing a worksheet with negative-number calculations where all the digits are sixes and sevens. Telling myself it’s meant to take the fun out of it for them – like a sex ed teacher having their students say ‘penis’ one hundred times before starting the unit. Definitely not the whole story, but plausible:…

by Jeroen Bouterse In Timur Vermes’ best-selling novel Er ist wieder da (‘He’s back’), Adolf Hitler wakes up in Berlin. Somewhat disoriented after discovering the year is 2011, he soon finds his way to the public eye again: he is understandably regarded as a skilled Hitler impersonator, an excellent ironic act for a 21st-century comedy…

by Jeroen Bouterse  Under Nanna’s moon – a girl under Nanna’s moon, alone I lie  Under Nanna’s moon drifting over the pure mountains alone I lie,  Under the mountains of the cedars where sleeps Mullil alone I lie.[1] “It would be nice to go back to caring about the moon”, writes Omar El Akkad in…

by Jeroen Bouterse I have been re-reading Paradise Lost, prompted by the battle between Immortals and demons in the movie Ne Zha 2. The film, if you have not seen it, depicts a ruling party turned into a vehicle for the personal ambitions of its leader. If you ask me, that is; consider yourself warned…

by Jeroen Bouterse I know teachers who imagine the tune is what they have on repeat in hell, but I myself am strongly pro-Kahoot. If (like me) you were born too early to have your own school experience center around a large screen, and (unlike me) you have one of those boring non-teaching jobs, a…

by Jeroen Bouterse In 2023, I wrote what I reckon was a calm, analytical column for this website, about how my country had talked itself into giving the xenophobic, far-right ‘Freedom Party’ a strong plurality of seats in Parliament. An equally level-headed update seems warranted, as its leader Geert Wilders has since maneuvered his party…

by Jeroen Bouterse In 1919, Otto Neurath was on trial for high treason, for his role in the short-lived Munich soviet republic. One of the witnesses for the defense was the famous scholar Max Weber. Neurath was a capable scholar with good ideas, a newspaper recorded Weber as saying; but recently he seemed to have…

by Jeroen Bouterse Even after discussing Daniel Chandler’s inspiring application of John Rawls in my previous column, I remain on the lookout for a book that delivers a sweeping, original and sound vision for the future of the liberal and democratic world, saves it from its social problems through policy proposals that are simultaneously transformative…

by Jeroen Bouterse In 2015, political scientist Larry Diamond warned against defeatism in the face of what he called the democratic recession. “It is vital that democrats in the established democracies not lose faith. […] If the current modest recession of democracy spirals into a depression, it will be because those of us in the…

by Jeroen Bouterse “You are aware”, I ask a pair of students celebrating their fourth successful die roll in a row, “that you are ruining this experiment?” They laugh obligingly. In four pairs, a small group of students is spending a few minutes rolling dice, awarding themselves 12 euros for every 5 or 6 and…

by Jeroen Bouterse Several years before C.P. Snow gave his famous lecture on the two cultures, the American physicist I.I. Rabi wrote about the problem of the disunity between the sciences and the humanities. “How can we hope”, he asked, “to obtain wisdom, the wisdom which is meaningful in our own time? We certainly cannot…

by Jeroen Bouterse On November 22nd, a far-right party received almost a quarter of the vote in the Dutch national elections, making it by far the largest of the fifteen parties elected to our new Parliament. Whether it will actually get to govern depends on its capacity to form a coalition, but what is certain…

by Jeroen Bouterse Without really looking into them, I have always felt sceptical of Kantian approaches to animal ethics. I never really trust them to play well with creatures who are different from us. Only recently, I cared to pick up a book to see what such an approach would actually look like in practice:…

by Jeroen Bouterse The cover of Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals (2023) shows a humpback whale breaching: a magnificent sight, intended to evoke both respect for the animal’s dignity, and interest in its particular forms of behavior. Here is a creature which has moral standing, without being a direct mirror of our human selves. It…

by Jeroen Bouterse Human treatment of animals is a moral calamity at an outrageous scale, that I can get from zero to really quite worked up about in a matter of seconds. For fear of hurting the cause, I allow myself to take part in polite conversation about the dead bodies on the dinner table…

by Jeroen Bouterse At the core of Susan Neiman’s new book Left is not Woke, which is an attempt to sever what she sees as reactionary intellectual tendencies from admirable progressive goals, is the idea that for progressive values to be sustainable, their roots in the philosophy of the European Enlightenment need to be recognized…

by Jeroen Bouterse In 2022, I worked harder than before to keep my students’ tables free of smartphones. That this is a matter for negotiation at all, is because on the surface, the devices do so many things, and students often make a reasonable, possibly-good-faith case for using it for a specific purpose. I forgot…

by Jeroen Bouterse I’m not sold on longtermism myself, but its proponents sure have my sympathy for the eagerness with which its opponents mine their arguments for repugnant conclusions. The basic idea, that we ought to do more for the benefit of future lives than we are doing now, is often seen as either ridiculous…