“The meaning is in the use.” It is a quote often used and taken from Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations. But what are actually the implications of this powerful phrase? This week I was assigned to give a lecture about the linguistic turn argument in the discussion on political obligation. Taking the argument from Hanna Pitkins text ‘Obligation and Consent‘ I tried to explain my colleague students what it states, but discussion showed the difficulty to truly understand it. As it is one of my favourite philosophical subjects, according to Wittgenstein the only one, I will give it another go.

Last Friday it was for the first time in my life I have felt some affiliation with the Dutch prime minister Balkenende. In his weekly talk on television he explained how and why the Dutch state was invited to be part of the G20 meeting about the current economic crisis. Through good diplomatic relations and a demonstrable capacity to deal with international and economic troubles he earned a recommendation of no less then Sarkozy and Bush. “Finally,” I thought, “finally the Dutch government is trying to recover its position as mediator and discussion partner.” For years we have just been following the path of others and not for the good. The day before I witnessed all of this I was to give a lecture about Martha Nussbaum at the university, about a text that can be seen as a guide to understand international relationships.

What if Africa is going to be the next economic power to rise? How that will influence the world is probably one of the first questions that pops up in somebodies mind. Another question would be how Africa will look like? Off course there is a lot to say about this related to the topics of industrialisation, agriculture, infrastructure, ICT and so on. One thing that particularly caught my attention is the way we should see Africa: a continent of diversity. But what is the power of diversity and when should we take profit from the exact opposite: unity?

For centuries and centuries philosophy has been searching for the fundamental concepts of our understanding of the world. Plato introduced his kingdom of ideas, while Aristotle was searching for the absolute truth in the essence of being, beautifully captured in Raphaels ‘School of Athens‘. The strive for a basic principle on which all our knowledge and understanding is funded continued to be the dominant idea in philosophy until the twentieth century, as I wish to claim, had shaken off the burden of this legacy and found the value of understanding the world as a contingent place, with contingent principles. This idea of contingent principles may sound like a paradox, but adds a perspective to our understanding of the network paradigm.

This post is related to this dutch text  that I’ve written before as part of an essay at the University of Amsterdam

In our communication it is important for us to have awareness of physical presence in one way or the other. One aspect off course is the role that body language plays. Also we can imagine the way we as human beings are orientated on the world and the influence that has on our understanding of communication done either in person or through modern communication technologies. Apparently this physical awareness is very much of importance in order for us to understand the origin of the message we are interpreting, but what if this context is missing? What if it is replaced by a new one and further more, are our networks contributing to this loss of origin?

Elections are considered by many the holy grail of democracy. When ever there is an intervention in one of the tragic places on earth, whether or not under the flag of the UN, one of the main aims seems to be the free elections. But how many times have we witnessed countries not reaching the promised utopian state after the democratic vote of its citizens has coloured the little circle in red? It makes you wonder if democracy is truly the great promise we think it is? This weeks class of the legitimacy of the state was dedicated to the theory of democracy by Thomas Christiano.

“Lets take this twelve year old girl that I am a godfather to. She has a cell phone, she is on the web, she has a Facebook page, she has friends from around the world in that space and for her, that was like for me growing up when we had radio and tv, it was just part of the atmosphere. For her it is part of the atmosphere too. So I think she is growing up not so much with the sense of entitlement, but rather a sense that this is the way the world is. And because she makes those assumptions she is going to build upon that too. I don’t know where that will lead, but being an optimist I trust in the human spirit to find its own way.” - Grady Booch, Chief Scientist, Software Engineering in IBM Research

In his Theory-U Otto Scharmer names four different forms of organizational structures that are related to the four different stages of listening (downloading, debating, dialogue and presencing) that we go through while travelling on the journey of the U: the centralized organisation, the decentralized organisation, the network organisation and the ecosystem organisation. To me it was quite an eye-opener to see the network in this row of organizational forms and to reflect on its position and its successor. But is the ecosystem an utopian ideology