Josie Ford
Nihilism and hypergunk
Irreducibly collective existence and bottomless nihilism aren’t for everyone. Or maybe they are. Jonas Werner, a philosopher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, published a crisp, perhaps irresistible, 16-page-long jotting called “Irreducibly collective existence and bottomless nihilism”.
The matter isn’t as simple as some people assume. Nor are some of its concepts, though they have colourful names. “Gunky objects”, for instance. Gunky objects, says Werner, are “objects such that every part of them has a proper part”. Gunkiness has to do with how-many-ness. How-many-ness is seldom simple. Werner explains: “There are distinctions between countable gunk (a gunky object that has not more …