About Sub Specie

Sub Specie is a blog dedicated to cursory thoughts and analyses of the interplay of science, culture, language, and artistic media. In a broad sense, it is about how ideas are disseminated in our lives, and the forms they are expressed in. The point of departure is my own experience, the research I come across, the books I read, the games I play, &c. In this digital age, we are all at the center of our own web of information, but we have the unique ability to reach out anywhere across the world and throw a strand to another person, thereby connecting our webs, and forging new perspectives through interaction.

These ideas and perspectives can take many forms, and act through various media. These media include scientific discourse, and traditional art forms such as literature and poetry, but Sub Specie also seeks to broaden its cultural perspective into the realm of popular culture, games, and digital media. The views presented here are often a layman’s view, as I have not been initiated (fully) into the analytical sciences that have arisen around different forms of cultural expression – language being the exception. However, I believe that the interdisciplinary perspective has much to offer to anyone who is as fascinated by human culture as much as I am. Here’s to a fruitful exchange.

I apologise beforehand for the many unfinished thoughts, unkept promises of more analyses, and periods of silence that will inevitably occur on this blog. It is the way my mind works, especially when I am busy with my job as a linguist, or writing about and publishing music, or spending time offline.

-Oscar Strik

Sub specie, latin for ‘under the aspect, form, perspective’; it finds its most famous use in the term sub specie aeternitatis ‘under the aspect of eternity’, used by Baruch de Spinoza and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others, to denote a perspective distanced from, or outside of, the world. Theoretically, such a perspective exists, and it offers a view of the world as a whole that is dispassionate and mystical at the same time. To attain such a perspective is perhaps a goal of science and philosophy alike. All the while, we are also bound to our own personal perspectives, our individual species. Each of these is unique, and of equal worth, but perhaps in their linking, they may attain to something greater than the sum of its parts.