#phliosophy

On the strength of his privileged background, al-Kindī ascended about as high as a philosopher could at this time, becoming attached to the court of at least one caliph, al-Muʿtaṣim. He was tutor to this caliph’s son Ahmad, and dedicated several works to him. Al-Kindī’s masterpiece, On First Philosophy, was addressed to the caliph himself—even though al-Muʿtaṣim was more the type to crack together the skulls of enemies like the Byzantines than to crack his own skull against the formidable ramparts of Aristotelian metaphysics. In On First Philosophy, and other works, al-Kindī was doing not just philosophy, but also public relations. He was explaining in detail why the newly translated texts emanating from his circle were valuable for a Muslim readership, especially the wealthy elite who sponsored the translations. In On First Philosophy al-Kindī responds stridently to certain unnamed critics, religious scholars who protested against the use of Hellenic philosophical materials. These opponents may have thought that the revelation of the Koran made such materials superfluous, at best. Al-Kindī responds that the truth is valuable, wherever we find it. He puts that sentiment into practice in his philosophical writings, showing that Greek ideas provide support and explication for Muslim beliefs, ranging from the oneness of God to the immortality of the soul.

I don't end up being constructivist or relativistic about knowledge. I don't end up saying, "Well, knowledge is constructed by our psychological biases and by the structural constraints of a certain network or a certain organization of knowledge." I'm not a skeptic about knowledge, but the way in which we construct our knowledge institutions matters a lot in order to understand what will be filtered as knowledge in a certain time span, in a certain era, for a certain society. It is important to know the constraints.

Philip Kitcher returns to 3:AM as part of the End Times series to discuss his thinking on ethics, Derek Parfit, on the use of stripped down thought experiments , on intuitions, on why we shouldn’t try for ethical peaks, on how he sees the ethical project, on what life after faith means for religion and science, on science and democracy, on Dewey and pragmatism, on science and values, on science education, on the point of philosophy, on Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and why life without literature and the arts is a mistake…

Upside down - Kint a Philosophy tavaszi-nyári száma!

super-duper truth of the day