Symphilosopher

As an initiative, Symphilosopher started January 1, 2020 by Juliet Jiayuan Chen, also known as Ella-Jenna Oosterglorenwoud. By the end of that year, she was joined by Johan F. Hoorn, also known as With the cognitive turn, critical rationalism, logic verification, and empirical validation, the poetry in our thinking has become suspect, particularly in the kind of science that takes place on an industrial scale with research output, KPIs, impact factors, and other performance indicators as the epitome of managerial control, displacing the lessons learned by our greatest minds, that imagination precedes all, logics and mathematics included. Do we now state that we don’t want specialists who build bridges or study micro-organisms? Of course not. We ourselves have engaged in robotics, the formalisation of theory, empirical testing, statistical analysis. We can write quantum circuits and 3D-model Metahumans in Unreal Engine. But we did not come from there nor did we stay there. We moved out of and back into poetry. As symphilosophers, we do not want to cooperate merely intellectually but also aesthetically, meaning that a project you want to do with us is scientific as well as artistic, thinking further than what the data allow us to conclude, using those findings for the fiction that leads the way to new scientific endeavours. Because imagination is what precedes all. We want a polyphony of voices, logics as well as psycho-logics, mathematics as well as mathemadness, superposed electrons at the basis of telepathy. But then that crazy underdeveloped theory will be ruthlessly formalised and empirically broken down to the bone, after which the crumbs and pieces are creatively combined into a new line of thinking, inspiring new paintings, calligraphies, fiction stories, sketching the contours of new lines of scientific inquiry and symphilosophy. Medium: Symphilosopher Instagram: Symphilosophia WeChat Official Account: Symphilosopher