The art of asking questions
“Is there a God?’
If I pose such a question to you, I am inviting you to surrender your belief. I am asking you to surrender your belief in whatever caused the universe to be, whether there is someone keeping an eye on us, who judges our actions, as if in mirror image.
It is such a very grand question. Too grand for me. I do not have an answer; I have a way of coping.1 We would need to commit to an answer without clear evidence either way. We have to commit to our answer, whatever it is, on faith. Such a commitment turns ideas into real things. All beliefs become real in the actions undertaken in their name and particularly in the consequences of those actions.
Kant’s three questions
A little further down on the scale of grandeur, but not much, we get three questions that Immanuel Kant claimed encompassed the full spectrum of philosophical enquiry.
The first is, “What can I know?” which is a metaphysical as well as an epistemological question. It engages with the problem of what there is to know and with the question what kind of activity knowing is and what counts as doing it.
Kant’s question quickly passes to the central questions of all science and scholarship: ‘What is there? And how does it work? And, How did it come to be this way? The first two are the questions of science and the last is the question of history.
The second of Kant’s great questions is “What ought I to do?” We may take it as given that this question follows from the first. To ask yourself what you ought to do, is to want reasons for your doings. And these reasons come from what you think you know.
A special kind of knowledge required to answer this question is the knowledge of good and bad. The question that expelled us from an innocent existence. We call that special knowledge ‘morality’. It is special in that this kind of knowledge manifests itself as a taste. It is a knowledge that is made up of a set of critical positions taken regarding what is good and what is bad.
The philosophical discipline investigating the arguments used to build that taste is the discipline of ethics. It tries to ground such a taste on good reasons. It is a difficult discipline, not because such reasons are difficult to come by, but because such reasons are engaged with questions of use and purpose and dressed in values and norms. Grounding uses, purposes, values and norms on good reasons quickly gets us into a swamp of deeply personal thought.
Then lastly there is, in the context of philosophical reflection at least, a rather surprising question: “What may I hope?” At least I found it surprising when I first read Kant. I am not sure what else I had expected, but it made me sit up.
But then I discovered its role in his philosophy. Such a question goes all the way to the core and ends up with that grandest of questions I started this essay off with. May I hope that there is something or someone keeping the books? Is someone keeping an eye on us? Will justice in the end be done? Will there be a proper reckoning? Can we hope for a heaven on earth, or a blessed life after death? Can we hope for humanity to learn from its history and stop being so exhaustingly difficult?
All these deeply comforting desires are what we might hope for. And when the promise of that comfort recedes as one puts away childish things, you perhaps learn to focus on what you can hope for in this life you are given, an existential hope in meaning not given ready made in a book but generated through one’s own actions ‘taking arms against a sea of troubles’; in the seeking of one’s responsibility in everything that happens without recourse to a transcendent but deeply silent mummy or daddy but with a responsibility towards a transcendent environment of which you are a small part.
What am I?
Notice how Kant’s questions are formulated in the first person. He asks what I can know, what I ought to do and what I can hope for. He appears to want us to focus on ourselves to become autonomous creatures. open to the world but in charge of our own beliefs.
And so we ask: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Did Gauguin paint the answer to these questions? Or did he merely frame the context in which he asked them? Is the mysterious sculpture to the left a suggestion as to where we come from? And what about the figure reaching for fruit in the centre? Is that what we are? The old woman to the right appears to be an answer to where we are going. We all go to old age and death. But, in old age we turn around and look back at our lives and become our own private judge: Was my life a good life? How should I decide such a profound question? Like Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus as described by Walter Benjamin: we fly backwards into the unknown looking back questioningly at the mess we leave behind. And when we have left where do we go?
“Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
The threat of retribution in an afterlife and the promise of a life lived well together formed the carrot and stick that made us get up every morning. Which was a real choice: Is it all worth it?
That is the central question in Hamlet’s beautiful speech where he asks perhaps the deepest existential question to be posed: whether to persist in living or to surrender to a quiet and peaceful death free of worry. The speech suffers slightly from its fame, nevertheless, take your time to read it anew as if you had never encountered it before and take some time to understand what is being said:
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
There you go: in that sleep of death, the dreams we have must give us pause. And so, maing the sensible choice, we go on living, or most of us do, until the bitter end. What strange creatures we are. But, What are we? Hamlet, in a despondent mood answers that question too:
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how
express and admirable! In action how like an angel!
In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the
world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust?
Hamlet (2.2.295-302), to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
And so we keep spinning like a top until the energy is dissipated and we slow down, giving one last dramatic turn as the body hits the ground, rolls about and stops.
Questions.
Question prepare answers in the form they are cast. Some questions elicit information to help us on our way. Other questions are journeys in themselves where the answers are just moments and crossroads along the way, temporary stop offs and points of departure. We ask questions in order to finish off or begin journeys. They are shaped by the feelings that give rise tot hem and are laid to rest only through the satisfaction of an answer.
They organize our spatiotemporal relations with our environment. This is the reason that they start off with pronouns such as what, when, where, who, whom, which, whose, why and how that can be used as determiners, adverbs, conjunctions and interjections.
Some of them do so by asking for an answer in the form of helpful information some ask for an explanation.
Asking for an explanation
The explanatory power of an answer to a question gives us the hope of understanding in the form of causal insight, or greater modal insight into the necessary, the contingent and the possible. Question demanding an explanation take us out of the plane forming our current frame of reference and expands it, changing its topology our space of implications.
We are not always rigorous with regard to the use of words know and understand. Using the latter to express sympathy whilst we haven’t got a clue what is going on. What then really counts as understanding something?
To understand something is to be able to say something like “I understand!” and to mean something by that that allows you to do something you could hitherto not do, or at least not with the same reason. People learning something sart off doing something because “She told me to”and end up doing it because they understand why it is a good idea. This is how the learning of manners leads to a reasoned knowledge of what to do.2 Complete understanding is however hard, it requires at least that you know to ask the following questions and rigorously vet the answers for their accuracy and truth:
Commitments: In committing yourself to this idea, what other ideas are you thereby committing yourself to?
Entitlements: What are you entitled to in committing yourself to that idea?
Compatibilities: What other ideas are compatible or incompatible with the idea?
Warrants: What activities become necessary to implementing or acting upon the idea in a happy way?
Guarantees: What outcomes may be expected or reasonably hoped for? Might there be any side-effects?
The answers to these brilliant questions by devised by Robert Brandom will give an account of the way things posited as facts are related spatiotemporally within our environment. This last allows us a measure of control over ourselves and our relations with that environment.
Aristotle’s Why?
They are complementary to the four “why” questions as formulated by Aristotle who wrote we do not have knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its why, that is to say, its cause.”3
I will not put them in the why form here, but it is easily done. Questions can be transposed and modulated into any key. The tired prostitute who asks: “how do you want it?”, asks it in a different mood to the mum who is pouring tea for her child.
Aristotle asks what an object or state of affairs is made of. The answer to that question establishes its material cause. Aristotle had no microscope or telescope so for him matter at the scale of the naked eye was somehow primal. But even he understood that at his scale of observation the form in which the matter was cast mattered. (pun intended) Shape and formal organization determine behaviour, making wholes out of working parts. So the next question was:
What shape or form does the object or state of affairs have? This establishes its so-called formal cause. Aristotelian Metaphysicians of today like to bunch the two together talking about matter/form compounds. The way that matter is organized in form gives it, or lays down the conditions for, most of the properties that can be attributed to it. INdeed it is difficult to decide whether matter is something without form, matter might just be a formal organization of forces, whatever they are.
Once you can look at the object as a thing shaped, you might ask yourself how it came about. That gives you the efficient cause which asks how the matter/form compound came about. What needed to happen for the table to appear as it does? It is the question that wants to understand the way the chisel is held, the heft of the spade, or the intricacies of putting together robotic circuitry.
The answers to the previous three do not satisfy. They leave and anxious making gap because really they are not real why questions but how questions. The last question is the real why question. Why are things there. Why is there something and not nothing? To answer this we need purpose. This is what Aristotle called the final cause which asks what the final purpose of the matter/form compound made is. It is this deeply puzzling question that gives answers like: “because there is a God”. We know why the carpenter made the chair, but why were birds of paradise made and mosquitoes? Why is there a universe? We all suspect a conspiracy of some sort. Existence cannot, surely, have no purpose?
Purposes
For a human being, Aristotle argues, the final purpose is to flourish. And indeed that may well be the best solution for any distinct thing. To see things flourish, is that not what a mother/ creator/ craftsman/ designer wants?
But purposes can go any which way. They are like soap; they slip about. You can ask what something does and get a pretty firm answer: this is what it does under such and such conditions. But to ask what the purpose of something is, is to mix the use that can be made of what something does into the equation. To call the use made of something its purpose is to somehow tie it down to a special or privileged use. When I ask for the purpose of something I am asking not about that thing but about the culture in which it lies embedded, the social stability a thing has been allotted within such a culture.
Questions too have a purpose. They are there to elicit information, sure. But what kind of information? For instance, with regard to the purpose of the grand question I started this essay with, I might be sizing you up to see if your answer conforms to what I want you to say, perhaps because I want you to have the same convictions as I hold, or because the state demands we all believe the same things. In that sense it would be a selective question: either you are in or you are out, with whatever consequences I might be brewing up with my actions either way. I might then be seeking power over you.
However, I might be asking you because I am hoping you will have an answer for me that will stop the anxiety within me and that will help me know what to do. In that case the answer will be either therapeutic or traumatic. I am in this case seeking power over myself.
If instead I ask, ‘Can I borrow your bicycle?’, I expect you to either grant me the use of your bike or not. I might, I suppose, ask it as a test of your generosity or our friendship. But there are countless other ways of doing that, so the chances are… I just need a bike.
These are questions with a practical purpose, questions that help us complete a recipe or help us find a way. Where is the station? How much salt? Do you have any ISO Class 12.9 bolts please?
Information
So, a question is a sentence uttered or a thought expressed with the aim to elicit information.
The emphasis on information is intriguing. Asking questions is then the same as looking about you, listening, smelling and touching… investigatively. It is the verbal equivalent of feeling about in the dark.
Information only becomes knowledge once it is processed analytically and critically in terms of use and purpose. As such, a question requests information which the questioner then needs to process into something that carries meaning, that is somehow useful, that can be taken to the next step.
“Yeah sure, we have 12.9 bolts…” “Eh, ah, Great! …eh… how much do they cost?”
Information needs to be drawn from the holder of information which suggests that there is a skill to asking questions to elicit exactly that information that you do not have but which will be helpful once you have it.
When following a recipe this is easy: How much pepper? We know what we need, but we do not know how much of it. But this is easily remedied. What we are doing is completing a picture, many of the bits we already have in place.
The brilliance of Kennedy’s short lesson in eliciting information has as its purpose to turn Americans inside out, from being self-centrered passive receivers into hetero-centrered active givers: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
Questions and nothingness
What happens when the questioner does not know anything, not what or how much, how or why, or where? At that moment things become truly existential.
A questioner needs purchase on the world. They cannot start from a vacuum or a completely smooth hard surface. They may want to clarify the indefinite, (apeiron) or wonder about absences, (Kenon), want the reason for the mess, (Kaos) or want an explanation for the curious lack of mess (Cosmos). They may wonder about the way things become (Chora) How things came to be (Topos) They may wonder what there is and how it works. (Analysis) Or how it matters to them (Critique), but without at least some purchase, there is no question.
You sometimes hear indulgent new parents ask the question, “I wonder what she is thinking, she must be completely bewildered by it all…” while looking adoringly at their newborn babe. Spoiler: new born babies do not wonder, they are not bewildered.
To be bewildered you need conceptual luggage, you need to have expectations. Newborn babies have no questions, they are still intimate with the world, have no differentiating boundaries as yet, are at one with it, have no way of deciding their boundaries, where the world begins and they end.
They do not even accept the world, they have no conception of acceptance. It is one of the hardest exercises you can do, to imagine what the world beyond thought is like. Because it isn’t. It cannot be like anything because comparison requires thought.
That which cannot think, has no world. Worlds are exclusively in consciousness. And ours is only one of an indeterminate number of possible forms of consciousness. Digital intelligence will be another. But the rest… just does what it does.
Consciousness does no more than what it does, but it does so by becoming aware of itself and its environment, by feeling about, questioning, learning, responding, that is what consciousness does, wholly within the remit of the laws of nature.
As such, questions come with differentiation, when things come to be by imposing a boundary and by not being what lies beyond that boundary.
Babies develop questions when they discover their boundaries.
What if the questioner does not know what they are asking? “Do you have any idea what you are asking?” he asked incredulously. The implications of the question are explosive. “Could you go to the pharmacy and collect my prescription for me?” “Do you have any idea what you are asking me to do?” “Could you please press the red button?” “Do you have any idea what you are asking me to do?”
Form and content
The immediate purpose of a question is to elicit information, the form of the question, the manner of its organization, its design if you like, is to elicit the right kind of information, or to dress the occasion with the right atmosphere. “‘Darling..’ he said huskily… would you…?”
If the questioner knows exactly what information they want, they are looking for confirmation. “I can smell it on your breath, did you smoke a cigarette?” The questioner wants a confession. A confession releases something, removes a thrombosis holding up the due process. If the interrogated staunchly deny and keep that up, there will never be resolution, there will be life with a kind of cancer, and kind of infection unless the questioner is able to remove all doubt from their mind.
When a question is formulated as a title, as in ‘the question’ in ‘The question of institutional reform’, the question becomes the subject in the form of a centering target for further discussion, debate and eventually resolution. Although even with its resolution, the question will not go away. Such questions remain questions for as long as there are institutions to reform.
Questions are part of the existence of that which needs constant or at least regular questioning. The existence of our institutions is maintained through constant questioning and constant reform based upon that questioning. It is part of the life of institutions, part of their renal metabolism, part of their liver function.
The rhetorical question is a question asked, not to get an answer, but to create a dramatic effect or to make a point. Rhetorical questions as such make a point by already knowing what information it will elicit. “Is the pope catholic?”
Our quick realization that the pope is the very quintessence of catholicity (if such a word exists) makes us think about a concealed point being made. In this case the person uttering the rhetorical question may be accusing their interlocutor of stating the obvious.
Analytical Questions and Critical Questions
I am particularly interested in questions that want to build models of the world by inviting reflection. We might try to distinguish a number of such questions.
There are questions of definition establishing what something is that is being talked about.
For this purpose Immanuel Kant developed a set of categories that would help you cover most of the angles of what something is.
There are questions relating to quantity
- Unity (One) What is it we are talking about that is considered to be a single whole? (a thing, a state of affairs)
- Plurality (Many) What are the different parts, options, or perspectives involved?
- Totality (Whole) How does everything fit together to form that single complete picture?
Then there are questions relating to quality
- Reality (Something is) What is actually happening?
- Negation (Not) What is missing, absent, or excluded?
- Limitation (Something but not everything) Where are the boundaries—what is it and where does it stop being what it is?
There are questions about relations
- Substance & Accident (Inherence) What is the essence of the thing, that is what cannot be taken away or changed without changing the thing we are talking about? And, what are features that could change without changing the thing itself?
- Cause & Effect (Causality) What brought the thing about, and what might follow from it?
- Reciprocity (Community) How do the different parts or people affect and depend on each other?
Lastly there are questions of modality
- Possibility/Impossibility, Could this happen, or is it impossible?
- Existence/Non-existence, How does this exist? In what mode? As an idea, as a thing? And how does it not exist? The unicorn exists as an idea, but you won’t find one walking past your window unless you are taking some very strange medicine. Having said that there are occasionally young deer that, through a genetic malfunction or an accident grow a single antler.
- Necessity/Contingency Does this have to be this way, or could it be otherwise?
But do not think you have the world by its handles once you have checked each of these questions off satisfactorily. For that you will also need answers to the questions a poet might ask, an architect, or a politician, or a dictator, or indeed his counterpart, the man who cleans up after him and after the war, the mess.
Power and critique
The point is that understanding needs to matter, and things matter only to conscious beings, whatever their levels of consciousness, whatever the level of intimacy with their environment. And they matter because there is engagement through use through being affected by everything.
The dictator, for instance wants power. Power needs leverage. If truth and understanding holds leverage he will want truth. If fear delivers leverage he will want to instill fear. If a lie helps him, he will gladly tell a lie. The dictator soon leaves behind the wisdom whereby means are carefully aligned with ends. Instead he will concentrate on effect.
The questions of power are questions of strategy to acquire and express power. Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Arendt, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Agamben and Deleuze and very recently da Empoli and others I do not know, each with brilliant answers to the question of how power entwines itself into every question, every answer, every sentence we speak.
We can analyze the powerful and that gives fascinating stories. What I look for in those stories is the role of our impoverished understanding of a frail and helplessly ignorant humanity that muddles on and that, through its enslaving addiction to its own innocence, its own comfort bubbles of thought allows power to emerge from its own ranks and get out of hand.
The powerful are no more guilty of their power and even their abuse of it than the meek who give them the means and allow them to seize it and abuse it. We are all responsible. Anger at the powerful who abuse their power is justified, but seek in that anger your own responsibility.
Critical questions then may be political in nature, economical, cultural, ideological or technical. They are about what to do and why. In other words they emphatically relate us to our environment.
The art of politics, that is the art of prioritizing our worries and anxieties, has to ask questions like: What are the most important and/or urgent concerns of this moment? Who is affected? And how? What should we do about it? What do we give priority? Is what we are proposing to do viable?
These questions are distinct but not separable from economical questions. Economists want to know what is valued and how to measure that value. How does value drive our decisions?
Culturally we ask who we are, where come from, where we are going and where we want to go. These questions implicitly hold norms, norms that in turn hold values and determine much of our flailing about.
Our cultural make up helps determine our ideological make-up which in turn forms our political and economical make-up.
Ideologically we ask ourselves what beliefs we —each of us individually— are prepared to commit to, and it asks us for the practical implications of that commitment and their extent. Are you prepared to die for your country? You mother? Your fortune?
Our ideological questions concern desire: What do you want? Look deeply inside yourself what is it you really want? Adventure? Stability? Do you want the prices to hold steady? Do you really want to be a leader? Sure, it looks appealing but do you know what it entails?
The exploration of logical space: the imagination
“What lies beyond that hillock?” You can perhaps imagine their posture as a child or a full grown explorer ask that question.
Imagine logical space as the set of all that is possible. It is the playing ground of pure mathematics, but also the playing ground of art and philosophical speculation. It is traversed through the ‘What if’ question, the purpose of which is to encourage the participants in a conversation to speculate upon possible scenarios exercising their causal and modal knowledge. What if there were a God? What if I were rich? In fact such questions encourage dwelling in one of our richest moods, the subjunctive, a mood expressing wishes, suggestions, demands, hypotheticals, or uncertainty.
What ought I to do? What if he were here? Would it be possible to….? These questions take us into the furthest reaches of logical space where things matter only in play, hypothetically. It is the space of pure thought, pure mathematics, pure imagination. It is the space of the possible. Travelling through logical space is best done by preserving our aesthetic discipline, by keeping our language our imagery and our mathematics coherent and consistent. Mind you ‘error’ is possible, as is ‘madness’.
There are questions that probe the impossible. But the truly impossible is…truly impossible and therefore unthinkable and so questioners of the possible who want to go there hit on monstrous hybrids. These are the people that see unicorns and men with faces in their chest holding one giant foot up as a parasol against the sun. How far are such monsters removed from brilliant insights?
Questions thus open up the field of enquiry inviting explorations and serendipitous findings, with questions such as, ‘Have you considered a?’ Have you considered enrolling in a bridge class?
Questions in education
There are at least two ways to deal with questions within a learning environment. A person can formulate and answer their own questions. In this case what needs to be taken into consideration is that it is that person’s own frame of reference that furnishes the space of implications complemented with whatever research the person is doing and the way that person processes the new evidence.
The critical dimension of such questioning will thus be confined to the intellectual abilities of that person. Questions will either be seen as correct or incorrect in relation to that frame of reference and their way of processing information. That is the nature of subjectivity.
The person can use the response to the question to reform their own frame of reference if they are open to that sort of thing but they have to do it by themselves. That is the nature of subjectivity. All knowledge is subjective.
The other way is to let a teacher help a student form and clarify a question. In this way the question begins from the frame of reference of the student but through discussion can show the student how to open up their frame of reference to allow a new facet in the discussion to emerge which may help their resolve any perplexity or dilemma they are struggling with. That is learning to question things.
So, what makes a good question? A good question prods and highlights an aspect of what a student is working on (a problem, a challenge, a project, a thought) so that they are able to explore and discover for themselves where to take their project and think clearly about the implications and ramifications of what they have done and what they are thinking about doing.
Exploratory questioning invites a person to look at an issue from all kinds of different angles and approaches.
As communication only works well when the interlocutors share the same vocabulary with the same meanings, or can at least negotiate common ground on this front, it is good to not avoid conversations about the vocabulary as used.
Such questioning concerns each other’s frame of reference held in the form of a dictionary of definitions, highlighting those properties that guide the inferential paths of exploration.
Further questioning tries to explore the implications and discover possibilities. Taking this line of questioning further we can ask our interlocutor to imagine and speculate.
Once we have looked at the field analytically we can then deliberately subjectify our questioning and look for specific uses, practical challenges and ways of achieving ends formulated. After that we can continue asking questions exploring practical matters.
And so, questions shape our thinking, as does feeling our way through a dark space. They reform our frame of reference, adding and reshaping concepts and their property relations, open up our space of implications to ones we might not have identified, shape and give direction to the paths of inference followed.
Brandom’s two questions
I want to end with two questions that I really wanted to start out with, but didn’t. They elaborate what was being said in the previous section and bring the whole essay some closure.
These two questions have come to dominate my approach to all the philosophical work I do. They are two very simple questions. But their simplicity belies a complex substructure and their proper distinction has enormous consequences.
The one is analytical, the other critical. The one objectifies, the other subjectifies and the one can easily be mistaken for the other and in fact often is, with unfortunate and sometimes disastrous consequences.
They start from an Aristotelian basis. Ask not what something is, ask what it does. All being is best analyzed through its doings. Ask not who Jacob is, asks what Jacob does to become and maintain himself as Jacob at all scales of his being, from the subatomic to the way he dresses, fromthe way he thinks to the way he behaves.
From this standpoint emerges the first question, the objectifying question: What counts as doing something?
But the answer to this question will only ever get us so far It will give us an analytical understanding of the thing. But to be able to use that understanding, to be able to put it to good use we need more, we need to know: what counts as doing it well?
This is where, under teh all encompassing umbrella of aesthetics, metaphysics and science spill over into ethics, into considerations of the good.
What happens when the second question is mistaken for the first? We get a curious kind of confusion that has in fact made our language more difficult than it need be. In this way only art that is good art is allowed the name art. Only architecture that is considered good architecture is allowed to be called architecture, so too with science and many other activities. To deny things that may not live up to your mark, existence is the ultimate form of snobbery.
Keeping the administration for these two very different questions separate on the other hand, brings wonderful clarity to the world of our doings, allowing the one its own objective space and only drawing it into our subjective space once a measure of understanding allows us to get purchase on it for use.
© jacob voorthuis, 2025. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
- I’d like to recommend a wonderful essay by Frans Kellendonk called Beeld en gelijkenis, published in De veren van de zwaan. Amsterdam, Meulenhoff (1987) ↩︎
- See André Comte-Sponville, (2002), A short Treatise on the Great Virtues, The uses of philosophy in everyday life, transl. Catherine Temerson, William Heinemann. Originally published in 1996, pp. 7-15 ↩︎
- Aristotle, Physics, 194 b17–20; see also Posterior Analytics 71 b9–11; 94 a20. ↩︎