Adventures in Philosophy

I often realize how much this blog is a conversation not just with you, my readers, but also with myself. Keeping a log is a bit like keeping a diary, but with a more specific subject – it will not cover every possible thing experienced, but those experiences connected with a certain journey. A journey which has several aims – to discover, to experience, to learn, to gain certain benefits, and more of which one is not aware beforehand. This makes every journey an adventure. Just as with the journeys of the seafarers of former times, who wrote their logs while travelling the world seas.

My log covers adventures in philosophy, which, as my motto states, understands itself as involved, or engaged. All the same, I live my adventure as a member of academia. This brings with it that many of my days are filled with solving puzzles relating to study programs, new blackboard (the internet space with that name) features, keeping a balance between work and home life, getting to know new colleagues, keeping up with faculty politics and university policies et cetera et cetera. In between I try to focus my reading and writing to reflect on specific questions, and fields of investigation.

Concerning this lastmentioned activity, institutionally labeled as ‘research’, there are very different seasons. Just as Kuhn said about the scientific community, the individual researcher too lives through phases of ‘normal science’ – working out certain specific questions in a given framework – and phases of ‘revolution’ when one questions the frameworks themselves. Writing my blog makes me more aware of what I am doing at the moment. I became more aware especially of what happens in those times that I do not write very often: in those times I am often questioning the frameworks, perhaps not in a revolutionary manner, but certainly as a process of deconstruction and reconstruction.

Lately there are many conferences with themes that interest me, and I am lucky I can attend quite a few of them. This experience, of something ‘brewing’ around me, makes me happily aware that ‘my’ process is getting more interconnected with the processes of others, and can find a stronger momentum just by the force that interconnectedness creates. Suddenly my interests are all over the place: the relations of humans and animals, of humans and nature, questioning the concepts of ‘humanity’ and ‘animality’, questioning modernism as a result, and some of its neighbors – eurocentrism, scientism, and an imperialism which is political and epistemic at the same time.

While last week, in Utrecht, at a conference called ‘What is it to be human? On the Humanities and practical self-understanding’ I enjoyed discussions with mostly philosophers on the meaning of ‘humanity’, at present I am preparing to join scientists and theologians to jointly question human uniqueness. This will involve presentations considering extra-terrestrial life, the relation between human beings and their God, and understanding humanity in nature – with contributions considering Chinese philosophy, Buddhism, the Quran… a wonderfully diverse program. My own presentation will be on the human-animal divide, asking: what is the difference between deconstructing and decolonizing it? I will look into the differences between these two approaches, and will discuss wherein they overlap. There is only one little problem I still have to solve – how to summarize the substance of my five pages paper to a presentation of only ten minutes… I will keep you posted.

• Academia
• Blogging
• Conferences
• Diversity
• Humanities
• Humans and Animals
• Interdisciplinarity