On Literature and Teaching

  Our duty is to resist Aldous Huxley wrote a little book many years after his classic ‘ Brave new world’ , reflecting on some of the ideas from his novel and how they had evolved over time – especially as WW2 had taken place in-between, and the Cold War was in full flow. And Huxley writes: ‘ Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them’ . Here in the Netherlands, after Sweden, after Finland, after Italy, Hungary, Poland, Serbia and Switzerland, a General Election (to elect members of Parliament, in order to form a new government) has seen a Far-Right political party win the most seats, and by some margin. The Netherlands’ electoral system is fully proportional, so that, typically, the Parliament is made up of many parties, inevitably leading to coalition governments (not one party can ever obtain a majority on its own). So we’ve got this Party for Freedom – a telling name if th

 There's a science-fiction short-story (by Asimov I think, but I'm not too sure - it could be David Brin) in which an Artificial Intelligence has been put in charge of the world. One of the things it does (among many, i.e. everything) is answer any question anyone may have: about the weather outside, the size of Mars, how much cake is eaten per day or what a word means. In short, the AI takes care of everything, including providing knowledge and information. In a time of Chatgpt, connected coffee-machines and self-replenishing fridges, I guess that story sounds old-hat. The point of it, though, is that one day the AI stops working - I cannot remember why, but it does. Forget about the food supply, machine-led agriculture, weather control and such considerations: the story focuses on what happens to people when their questions cannot be answered immediately. As you can imagine, those people are lost - they just don't know what to do, how to react, they have none of the knowl

  Ask yourself: what do you mean by ‘ Thinking about something ’? Or you can approach that from a different perspective perhaps: is a scientific discovery the result of the thinking that was taking place at the time of the discovery? Or is the discovery an event that takes place after a whole lot of thinking was done, and when the thinking properly so-called is now unfocused? In other words: there’s thinking-about-one-thing , and there’s thinking about a network of relations – about things in their relationship and not just as themselves. In a way, it’s the same distinction we can make between meaning and interpretation, as Lars Svendsen put it rather neatly: ‘ Information and meaning are not identical. To simplify, one could say that meaning consists of assembling small parts which fit together to form a bigger whole, whereas information is the opposite ’ . The act of reading is to accumulate information – then to interpret it. It’s really the same in everyday life: ofte