by Jeroen Bouterse “The constant direct mode of address was a chore. No one will enjoy having this read to them.” Quoting from a referee report on the Nicomachean Ethics misses the point of James Warren’s hilarious rejection letter, but I looked it up because I remember thinking that the fictional critic was onto something,…

by Jeroen Bouterse He had a visceral aversion to war, was strongly in favor of social distancing in times of pandemic, and believed it would be a good thing if the Germans turned down their heaters a notch or two.[1] Of these still sympathetic opinions, the last was admittedly informed by his discomfort with wood…

by Jeroen Bouterse “Everyone feels it’s an unbearable thought, to be limited in time, – but what if you were spatially unlimited, would that not be […] as desolate as immortality? By Zeus, no one is ever depressed because they do not physically coincide with the universe, I at least have never heard a philosopher…

by Jeroen Bouterse Permanent Crisis In one of the opening scenes of The Chair (2021), we are treated to an ideal-typical self-diagnosis of a struggling English department. Its new chair, Ji-Yoon Kim, narrates: I’m not gonna sugarcoat this: we are in dire crisis. Enrollments are down more than 30 percent, our budget is being gutted.…

by Jeroen Bouterse It’s my favorite topic of the year, I tell the kids, before scanning my conscience for signs that I have just lied to them. No, this feels about right, and in any case, they didn’t need my reassurance: after a dry unit about ratios, at my mention of the word “probability” I…

by Jeroen Bouterse “I am by nature too dull to comprehend the subtleties of the ancients; I cannot rely on my memory to retain for long what I have learned; and my style betrays its own lack of polish.”[1] Among the benefits that reading the twelfth-century philosopher John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon has brought me were…

by Jeroen Bouterse “Why, during the seventeenth century, did people who knew all the arguments that there is a God stop finding God’s reality intuitively obvious?” This, says Alec Ryrie in his Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2019), is the heart of the question of early modern unbelief (136). Ryrie’s point is that arguments…

by Jeroen Bouterse Unfortunately, it is always worth your time to read a book in praise of the humanities. Given the unenviable position of the humanities in public education and in contemporary cultural and (especially) political discourse about valuable expertise, any author that comes to their defense has to find a strategy to shift the…

by Jeroen Bouterse Three times have we started doing philosophy, and three times has the enterprise come to a somewhat embarrassing end, being supplanted by other activities while failing anyway to deliver whatever goods it had promised. Each of those three times corresponds to a part of Stephen Gaukroger’s recent book The Failures of Philosophy,…

by Jeroen Bouterse Here’s an interesting game. You receive 20 dollars, and you and three others can anonymously contribute any portion of this amount to a public pool. The amount of money in this pool is then multiplied by 1.5 and divided equally among all players. Repeat 10 times, then go home with your money.…

by Jeroen Bouterse The most charitable, forward-looking take on the science wars of the 90s is Stephen Jay Gould’s, in The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox (2003), a delightful book about dichotomies between the sciences and humanities. His diagnosis is primarily that scientists have taken too literally or too seriously some fashionable nonsense,…

by Jeroen Bouterse Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History is a clearly written argument if ever there was one. Bregman believes humans are a kind species and that we should arrange society accordingly. The reason why this thesis needs intellectual support at all is not that it is particularly profound or complicated, but that there…

by Jeroen Bouterse I sometimes consider becoming a skeptic, but then I’m not so sure what that entails. Mind you, I mean a proper skeptic, a Pyrrhonist or something. What attracts me is not this unsustainable Cartesian angst about maybe living in the Matrix, but the wholesome promise of the ancient skeptics: that if you…

by Jeroen Bouterse For the same reason as large parts of the world, I spend even more time indoors these days than I already would. One thing I have been doing is rereading the Harry Potter books – or paying Stephen Fry to read them to me. I will have you know that I ‘grew…

by Jeroen Bouterse If you, like me, have read premodern philosophers not just for antiquarian interest but also as possible sources of wisdom, you will probably have felt a certain awkwardness. Looking for guidance or assistance in ordering our own beliefs, attitudes and actions, we inevitably run into the problem that the great thinkers of…

by Jeroen Bouterse I have some very simple New Year’s resolutions, and some that require an entire column to spell out. One example of the latter is that I want to make a subtle but meaningful change in how I talk to my (middle and high school) math students about proofs. First, I need to…

by Jeroen Bouterse In a radio sketch by the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, David Mitchell plays an interviewer trying to get a cabinet minister to say what he really thinks about the government’s funding cuts. At first, Robert Webb, playing the minister, says there is no disagreement between him and the cabinet,…

by Jeroen Bouterse For better or worse, Dutch 20th-century postwar literature comes with a canon of three authors: Gerard Reve, Harry Mulisch, and W.F. Hermans. There, you learned something today. Other than this factoid, however, this post is not going to be a lecture about the landscape of Dutch literature, or even the literary qualities…

by Jeroen Bouterse I remember the first time I thought I might be able to get on board with Stoicism. I read a passage in Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights, about a distinguished Stoic philosopher on a ship crossing the Ionian sea. The ship finds itself in a violent storm, and seems to be on the…

by Jeroen Bouterse Have you ever been in this situation where you had to get a group of 3 men and their sisters across a river, but the boat only held two and you had to take precautions to ensure the women got across without being assaulted? This problem is one of 53 puzzles in…