Joe Jaspers obtained a Researchmasters in philosophy (UvA), where he worked mainly on philosophical issues bridging aesthetics with ethics and epistemology: his Bachelor thesis examined the moral concept of evil as an aesthetic judgement, while his master’s used nietzschean aesthetics to explore the tension between our valuation of untruth in art with our moral valuation of truth in general.

He will be working for Extreme Beliefs as a general intern, but aims to use the state-of-the-art to a) explore questions regarding the normative weight of our delineations of the concept of extremism, the relationship between laudable ‘parrhesia’ and reprehensible conspiracy thinking, and the demarcation of universal and possibly benevolent forms of self-deception from ones that are morally and epistemologically detrimental – while b) trying to keep sight of the way in which these questions bear on a understanding of deradicalisation and real-world policy-making.