· You cannot write more truly about yourself than you are. That is the difference between writing about yourself and writing about external things. You write about yourself from your own height. Here you don't stand on stilts or on a ladder but on your bare feet.
· Es is unmmöglich wahrer über sich selbst zu schreiben, als man ist. Das is der Unterschied zwischen über sich & über äußere Gegenstände. über sich schreibt man, so hoch man ist. Da steht man nicht auf Stelzen oder einer Leiter sondern auf den bloßen Füßen.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein (Culture and Value/Vermischte Bemerkungen, Blackwell, UK, 1998)
My name is Jukka Nikulainen. The last time I updated this page I was 22 years of age (and I should be about that age at the moment). I'm a student and currently residing in Helsinki. I try to survive through life and the endless contradictions which shape our being and which we all inevitably face between hybris and nemesis, friendships and loneliness, communicating and soliloquizing, between the rich and the poor of this world ... by escaping to the world of philosophy, poetry and literature. I find eccentric (analytical) philosophy, the rugged and nature around me, nightly parks in the city, the inexhaustible depths of human nature and (equally inexhaustible) conversations with my friends to be better for disenthrallment and exoneration from the mundane world than any drug I know (this proposition, though, is thus relative to the drugs I do know, which are not-a-plenty). If life indeed is but a dream, I too wonder whose it is and whether he, she or it is having any fun.
The internet an ever so curious thing. I started my journey across the Web back in the days when modem speeds were measured and awed at in Bauds and you were supposed to connect first to your friends BBS and Telnet onwards to view any sites abroad. Even today I cannot but admire the incredible creative input so many people dedicate to different sites out there. I can but hope that my meagre effort will add to the chaos and randomness of the beast.
More nontrivial facts about me are that I major in theoretical philosophy and my secondary subject is classical philology (Latin and ancient Greek) both of which I am at the moment studying pertinaciously at the University of Helsinki. My particular areas of interest in philosophy are e.g. the interpretation and reconciliation of critical, transcendental philosophy and transcendental arguments with different varieties of pragmatism, or more generally, naturalism. My B.A. thesis studied the relationships of Charles S. Peirce and Ludwig Wittgenstein critically compared with Immanuel Kant on this theme. Naturally I am also interested in different classical authors, especially philosophers of the Hellenistic tradition, and I have taken up a latent and peculiar, perverted interest towards different systems of philosophical logic, although I cannot say they would be the strongest area of my competence.
As I am spending most of my days trying to decipher and understand the writings of Wittgenstein and Peirce and my evenings translating Pliny and Aristophanes, I tend to try to use my spare time for some things completely different. These pages are centered on some of those subjects but —as you will surely concord— present only those sides of my life I have seen fit to bestow for your eyes.
If you do, for some exceptionally singular reason indeed, feel an inextinguishable urge to contact me, please, do feel yourself most welcome to do precisely that by —either writing me email to — or, operosely enough, by trying to locate me at the campus or in the city.
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