Nolen Gertz is Assistant Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of Twente, Netherlands, Senior Researcher at the 4TU.Centre for Ethics of Technology, and the author of The Philosophy of War and Exile: From the Humanity of War to the Inhumanity of Peace (Palgrave 2014).

Describing himself as a “continental philosopher trying to live in an analytic philosophy world”, Gertz’s career as a philosopher began at The George Washington University before he went on to complete his PhD at The New School for Social Research,  His philosophical interests include applied ethics, social and political philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, and aesthetics. Amid his engagements as an ‘ethicist for hire’, he is currently focused on investigating the relationship between nihilism and technology.

—David Maclean

DM: Why do baby names, particularly unusual ones, provoke such a strong reaction?

NG: I think it’s certainly something that stressed me out, both as a parent and as someone who has a somewhat unusual name. I’ve had the experience of people actually telling me that my name is spelt wrong. One of the first things people ask is what your name is, or thinking about those “Hello my name is…” stickers – we put a lot of stock in that information and we overdetermine that the name is somehow representative of the person’s character, lineage, future, etc. And thus you also get a sense of what the parents envisioned for the child, so this also reflects the parents’ character. I think that this idea that the name means something is very important for us. So I think that also part of it, from an existential perspective, is how important it is that we reduce things to their names, whether humans or objects.