Ren de Jong

When I graduated high school and had to decide what to do next, I was absolutely clueless. I went to a bunch of education fairs and was overwhelmed by the possibilities. Everything seemed interesting! Philosophy already caught my eye but I was afraid it would be too theoretical for me. I thought it would only be reading about dudes that lived a thousand years ago. So in the end I chose Biology since it was a really broad study. Although I liked it, in the back of my mind I was still thinking about studying something else on top of it. The minor in my third year proved an excellent opportunity to take a closer look at philosophy. Initially I intended to do only the Philosophy minor but after completing the first semester I was already sold.

The Philosophy minor made me aware that my whole mindset was adjusted to studying biology. I had gotten used to learning biological mechanisms, doing experiments and writing reports but I had forgotten to look beyond this. The “why-questions” had faded to the background but became very prominent while I was studying for the Philosophy minor:

What does it actually mean to do research? How are ethics and science connected? What is permitted in science and what are the implications of discoveries for society?

So in short, I really liked philosophy. Doing the whole Philosophy bachelor’s would cost me an extra three years, so I decided to register for Philosophy of a specific discipline instead. This is a one-year programme so it wouldn’t delay me too much but I could still get some in-depth knowledge.

While doing the Philosophy minor I was mostly interested in ethics and social & political philosophy so I decided to do more of these courses. Last year I followed a course in ethics and we had to write an essay on a topic of our own choice. This seemed like a good excuse to try and combine philosophy with biology, so I wrote about evolution and morality. Being intrigued by this topic I even made it the topic of my thesis. It was about the question whether evolution can undermine the existence of objective moral values. This way I was able to look at the implications of evolution (my specialization within biology) in other fields.

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