Beetle in a Box is a philosophy magazine produced by students at the University of California, Berkeley. We were founded in 2025 and publish an issue semesterly.
In the iconic Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein posits that we can have meaningful conversations about certain things even if our mental or sensational conceptualization of them differs. The thought experiment goes as follows: imagine a group of people, each one with a box. Inside each box is something everyone calls a “beetle.” While each person can look into their own box, no one is allowed to look into anyone else’s. Yet they all chatter meaningfully about beetles—beetles are gross! Beetles are fussy! Beetles are small! Whether each person’s box contains the same thing seems irrelevant. Meaning comes ultimately from the way we use language.
At Beetle in a Box, we hope to prevail in the same way despite potential internal differences, to make our most unique ideas communal. Hopefully, whatever discrepancy there may be in our beetles will only cause more coalescing thoughts and out-of-the-box reasoning.