Editorial

Election Team Appetitus

Appetitus is a concept that Leibniz used for the striving of unity in every monad. As a praesidium our goal should be to strive for unity, not only within the praesidium but among all philosophy students. We are a team! Secondly, derived from ‘appetitus’ is appetite. This doesn’t only mean a desire for food, but also passion and longing in general. We want to fulfil our function as the praesidium with passion.We are longing for the (virtual) election week and hopefully you are too!With your help we can get elected as the praesidium of NFK 2020-2021!

NFK

NFK is the abbreviation of ‘Nieuwe Filosofische Kring’ which means ‘New Philosophical Association”. NFK is a student association organized by philosophy students for philosophy students, in connection with the Institute of Philosophy at KU Leuven. Every philosophy student is automatically a member of NFK. This means you can join any NFK activity at any time, buy your courses and readers at discount prices at our ‘cudi’ and contact us with any academic question or remark you have. We do not have ‘student baptism‘ or ‘hazing’ rituals, NFK is welcoming to all!

The Praesidium

The main goal of a student association is to connect, entertain and help their members. To realise that, the praesidium of NFK consists of student collaboration and student representation.

As a student collaboration NFK organises all kinds of events; small and big events, for culture and book lovers as well as for party animals and even for the sportfans among us. That goes from games nights to TD’s and cantusses to a fancy Gala ball, from  facilitating reading groups to visiting a museum or concert to an open expo, from weekly breadmeals to the Christmas Dinner and so on. The search for a fakbar will also continue. We want to bring people together on all our events. We’ll also create the possibility for people outside the praesidium to give ideas about events they would like to see organised. They can of course talk to someone of the praesidium, but we’ll also make an online form. These ideas will be discussed at the PV. There will still be some workgroups to organise events like the culture trip, the Christmas dinner, the Gala ball etc. which are open for people outside the praesidium. We want to be as open, inclusive and approachable as possible by organising events for everyone, making the praesidium members and NFK visible and having a year representative in the Dutch and international bachelors.

We represent every philosophy student. We defend the interests of the students and give them a voice to address problems, while still respecting the ideas of the faculty. We want to promote the student representation more, so students know they are represented. The most important way to represent all students is with the open education meetings. We want to attract more people there so they can give their opinion on all kind of matters. We will defend that representative opinion in meetings on faculty and university level. We want make the representatives more visible and make more use of the NFK Education Facebook page. The student collaboration and student representation of NFK will also be more connected, what might help to make the student representation more known. The praeses, Liesa Vosch, will be the head of both.

Besides this little change, we will keep the structure of the praesidium as it is. That means that the high praesidium will manage the daily working of the praesidium by communicating closely and by meeting biweekly. The high praesidium will consist of the praeses (Liesa), the vice-praeses (Ian), the treasurers (Marie and Emma) and the coordinators of the most important functions (Nina, Edna, Alex, Tycho). The praesidium is no less important however and will thus also meet biweekly as a whole.

We want to connect all philosophy students, but especially the Flemish and international students. We hope to achieve this by involving internationals in both the praesidium and in NFK education. We’ll also organise specific events that connect people and of course everything is promoted in both English and Dutch.