Jeroen Bouterse works as a middle school mathematics teacher, having completed a PhD in the philosophy of history of science at Leiden University. He is interested in conceptual and historical issues concerning the relations between the sciences and the humanities, science and religion, and atheism. Email: jeroen.bouterse [at] gmail.com
by Jeroen Bouterse I don’t know how much you know about Petrarch. My guess is that you know him as a poet, primarily for his sonnets. Maybe you associate him with early Italian humanism and its reinvigorated dedication to the wisdom of classical Antiquity. Or perhaps you think of him as someone who expressed transcendental…
by Jeroen Bouterse “Am I ever going to use this later?” As a math teacher, I seem to be getting this question about once a month (which is actually less frequently than I would have predicted). It is asked with varying degrees of openness to the idea that a satisfying reply is even conceivable, but…
by Jeroen Bouterse It is simultaneously awkward and exciting to read about your own consciously and responsibly adopted beliefs as something to be anatomized. It is also something atheists are not always much disposed to. On the contrary, perhaps: many forms of atheism present themselves as a consequence of free thought, of emancipation from tradition.…
by Jeroen Bouterse It is a commonplace to say that a divide has occurred in modern academia between the sciences and the humanities. In the anglophone world, this diagnosis is often traced back to a lecture by the British scientist-novelist Charles Snow, who pointed out in 1959 what he saw as a lamentable gap between…
by Jeroen Bouterse What do you prove by fooling somebody? What did Alan Sokal prove when he got his bogus paper on ‘quantum hermeneutics’ published in Social Text? What did Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian prove when they got several bogus papers published in several different journals? Earlier this month three authors (to…
by Jeroen Bouterse One of the most simple, elegant and powerful formulations of the conflict between science and religion is the following bit of reasoning. ‘Faith’ is belief in the absence of evidence; science demands that beliefs are always grounded in evidence. Therefore, the two are mutually exclusive. This is an oft-repeated argument by modern…
by Jeroen Bouterse The past years have seen many debates about the limits of science. These debates are often phrased in the terminology of scientism, or in the form of a question about the status of the humanities. Scientism is a notoriously vague term, and its vagueness can be put to the advantage of either…
by Jeroen Bouterse Steven Pinker’s 2018 book Enlightenment Now is a reasoned defense of the values of the Enlightenment: of reason, science, humanism and progress. Pinker uses most of his space to demonstrate, positively, how the attitudes and institutions associated with Enlightenment thought have done good in the world. However, he has also woven through…