Groningen Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Thought

As a member of a Dutch university, perhaps I shouldn’t talk about the World Cup. But as a (casual) supporter of the English football team, I’ve been talking about it far more than I expected. England, of course, are out of the competition. Football is not...

Despite its name, junk food is good, tasty and appealing to many people [*]. Many people consciously decide to eat junk food simply because they just like it. Doctors say that junk food is unhealthy, and that a junk food diet is going to have bad...

It will soon be exactly ten years since Nicholas Carr wrote his much discussed article “Is Google Making us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains”.* In it, Carr discusses the effects of extended internet use on his mind and that of his friends....

The story of the Fall could be seen as a basic motif for early modern thinkers, for the story crystallizes mankind’s moral and intellectual struggle. Let’s look at what Spinoza says about it in the Ethics:

In 1776, James Boswell visited David Hume on his deathbed and asked him about his religious beliefs. Hume famously replied that he hadn’t entertained any belief in religion, ever since he began reading Locke and Clarke. This anecdote has become famous for...

Man errs. And, indeed, man cannot not err… because man is, fundamentally and unavoidably, of a “deceptible condition”, which is the “common infirmity of human nature” and the “first and father cause of common error”. This is the warning that sir Thomas...

**Today, most of us find it commonsensical to think that our minds are tucked away in our bodies, hidden from others, while the skin provides a boundary of our precious selves. But this is not the only way to think about ourselves. What if thoughts and...

Anne Conway rejected the existence of hell. A possible reason is theological: punishing finite sins with infinite suffering would be unjust and contradict the divine nature (see Hutton, SEP). But such an interpretation suggests that we have access to God’s...

Habits are a key component of our daily life. Our habits are all those actions that we perform so often and so regularly that we do them almost automatically and without thinking. Now, no habit was a habit in the beginning. But because habits are so...

In a time with unprecedented access to information, unraveling truth is sometimes overwhelming. When in an epistemic bubble, it is often easier to resign oneself either to that way of thinking, or to a sense of skepticism, than to experience the anxiety...