Irina Elena Popa

Hello! I’m Irina Popa, a Physics student at Babeș – Bolyai University in Romania. Long before I even knew that academic subjects like Philosophy or the Natural Sciences existed, I used to ask the kind of questions most children do. Much later, I discovered that many of those were actually philosophical questions. Anyway, I’m still bothering people with questions just as I did back then, yet now, as a future scientist, I also get the chance to try answering some of them myself. Sometime when I began high school I was quite surprised to find in the first line of one of Heidegger’s books (an accessible one, surprisingly, it was his “Introduction to Metaphysics”) the very question that bothered me the most for a long time, “Why is there being at all, and not rather nothing?”. I prefer to approach this question through Physics (cosmology) rather than Metaphysics, but I still enjoy reading and discussing Philosophy. When it comes to my own philosophical views, I’m rather old-school, I tend to refer to Kant in most discussions about ethics, metaphysics and sometimes even philosophy of science – which is, of course, the branch of philosophy I’m most familiar with. At the moment, I’m particularly interested in plasma physics and theoretical physics.