In this scholarly analysis, Muhammad Ahmedullah shows how the works of Ibn Khaldun and Karl Marx share some striking similarities, despite being centuries apart.
Extinction is not just a matter of life and death, it is the hinge between existence and non-being. Today, the rising threat of mass extinction poses an unprecedented challenge for security, and to the ontology and ethics that attend it.
Standing admist a volatile and gloomy global scenario, when humanity is being slaughtered mercilessly every moment, a famous line by Ayn Rand from her famous novel ‘The Fountainhead’ came to the mind of Nilantika Banarjee – “Inspite of whatever their future – at the wake of life men seek a noble vision of man’s nature and life’s potential”. The main philosophy endorsed in the novel is that everything we have, everything we are, comes from a single attribute – the function of our reasoning mind – this made me think whether we ask the war-mongers to give peace a chance or should we ask them to give a chance to themselves!
Steve Snyder composes a thought-provoking examination into how we critically evaluate the quality of art. By canvassing his thoughts on some of history’s most celebrated artists, Snyder equips us with the tools to better distinguish the authentic from inauthentic.
Dr. Massimo Pigliucci, a Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York explains the Brain in a Vat(BIV) thought experiment commonly used to illustrate academic skepticism in the discipline of philosophy. He sees the famous scifi movie -The Matrix as a philosophical thought experiment where Neo (Keanu Reeves), turns out, is much closer to the “brain-in-the-vat” (BIV) scenario of modern philosophy of mind (to be precise, he is a body-in-the-vat), with all his “experiences” actually being fed to him via artificial stimulation for the purposes of an evil post-technological civilization of machines that have enslaved humanity.
Dr. Kate Raworth outlines a guerrilla campaign for economics students. Dr. Raworth proposes that students should vandalise macroeconomic textbooks to alter the diagram on the Circular Flow of Money. Anyone can participate in this campaign because all they need is a pencil. She outlines the plan: “Sneak into the bookshops, the libraries and classrooms, and into the office of every economics professor you know. Get out the macroeconomic textbooks and find that diagram. Take your pencil. Now draw in the environment. Draw in the unpaid care economy. Draw in social inequality.”In her opinion this is one of the ways to save next generations of economics students, “from having the wrong model of the world stuck in the back of their heads.”
Alochonaa (Dialogue) 