Category: Podium Pieces
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Uses of Philosophy
Critical and Postcritical Interventions in the Philosophical Canon Introduction This paper encourages academic philosophers in the Netherlands[1] to consider three questions: What do we study and teach? How do we study and teach? And why do we study and teach? The answer to the first question is no longer self-evident. For the past few decades,…
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Virtual Presence and Descartes’ Last Stand
Are we fully ‘present’ in a virtual world when we are playing in VR? Or does a VR headset finally turn us into the detached spectators Descartes always said we were? According to Hubert Dreyfus, the epistemological concerns that were largely abandoned by philosophers in the twentieth century, have become very relevant again in the…
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The Expiration Date of Human Rights: Rights of the Living and the Dead
Introduction Mexico has been dealing with a forensic crisis for years. The crisis, which allegedly began in 2006 at the beginning of the war against drug trafficking, continues to worsen every year. More than 111,000 persons were registered missing in October 2023 in the interior ministry’s database, not including the many persons who went missing…
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The Earth as Human Condition: Against Negative Worldbuilding in the Anthropocene
In this essay, we will use two thinkers that are not normally associated with debates surrounding the Anthropocene: Hannah Arendt and Achille Mbembe. Even though both of them are predominantly political thinkers, we think their ideas are a good avenue to explore when thinking about the Anthropocene. We aim to do three things within this…
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Animal Citizenship in Gene Drive Ethics
An Evaluative Application of Donaldson and Kymlicka’s Citizenship Framework to Human Intervention and Management of Non-Humans in Gene Drive Engineering Introduction Increasing interest in methods of conserving non-human animals has emerged in light of the ever-growing Red List of Endangered Species. The Red List appraises each species on a series of standards in its scientific…
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Longing for a Fantastical ‘Home’
Self-Reflections on the Problematics for a Queer Tourist and Future Expat in Budapest “And when I’m back in Chicago, I feel it Another version of me, I was in it Oh, I wave goodbye to the end of beginning” (Djo 2022 “End of Beginning”) In early 2024, the song “End of Beginning” by the artist…
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The Ethopolitics of Reproduction
Biopolitical strategies and their effects on the reproductive choices of people with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and carriers for genetic conditions (Content Warning: This essay discusses eugenics, abortion, ableism, disability, chronic illness and genetic conditions in a manner which might be uncomfortable or upsetting for some readers.) “We face discrimination every day in schools, in the…
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The Fall of Western Puritanical Morality as a Descriptor of Cultural Variation
Introduction Cultural evolution is a notion that describes social practices and beliefs as continually changing. While humans are in a continuous process of biological evolution, their sociocultural practices are also transforming. Particularly, practices of puritanical morality are changing due to cultural evolution. These are practices whereby one’s actions align with cultural standards of what is…
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Uses of Dialogue; or, Why We Love Plato
The author would like to thank Kyrke Otto and the Splijtstof editorial team for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. Why do we love Plato? To the historian of philosophy, this must come across as a strange, if not out-of-place question. Not because he or she would necessarily deny its premise,…
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Towards a Decolonial Ecology
Indigenous Conceptualizations of, and Cosmological Relationships to, the Natural World Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to…