Old Series

… By the 19^th century, the natural science would observe the emergence of a new focus throughout their disciplinary offspring: the social sciences. The human would become the new element of reference for all possible enquiries about the world. Marx, Nietzsche or Freud would, in their own respective way, prioritise the human factor within a number of worldly processes that were earlier discussed only through larger principles. Psychology would be one of such disciplines, pushing the nascent cognitive science set by Kant to enquire on the way human’s mental faculties function. It is in this context that the approach of phenomenology would take shape in the late 19^th century, with Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl. According to the phenomenologists, the world and the human being has to be investigated through the specific evaluation of human consciousness. Husserl would soon realise how, unlike in the case of physical science, a study of consciousness must directly address the question of time. Phenomenology, from the start, would be — among other things — a discourse on time. It is this discourse that I hope to explore in this series.

Emmanuel Levinas is not a philosopher of love. The Lithuanian-born, French Jewish thinker gave birth to a rather substantial œuvre, writing for nearly seventy years on a variety of themes and questions. If love appears in the prose of Levinas, including in his two major works, Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise Than Being (1974), it is not as a topic in itself, but for the role it would play in the larger discussion that the author wanted to undertake . . . It is the tension between Levinas and feminist commentators such as de Beauvoir and Irigaray, which I shall try to explore in this essay. Behind the scholarly discussion, the stakes of this question is the place of concerns of genders in a contemporary, and otherwise incredibly seductive theory of ethics. Should one gender be necessarily ‘sacrificed’ in the construction of an understanding of ethics? But, if not, how much can we invest ourselves in pretensions of universal equality and sameness between the genders? Would not that be denying fundamental differences? In other words: can we acknowledge the genders and their differences without, by the same, forming a new hierarchy?

History and lie. Fifth century B.C. Herodotus is equally known as the ‘Father of History’ and the ‘Father of Lies’. His chronological and causal accounts of the Persian Wars may have marked the beginning of history as a discipline, but it was ignored by none, from his contemporaries to his most postmodern commentators, that Herodotus also included in his records some factually questionable episodes . . . If we follow the main trends of western intellectual traditions, we find Herodotus as the first historian. More than a recording writer, he himself, in person, visited numbers of countries. His profile was strangely similar to that of his French, British and American colleagues of the 18th to 21st centuries. Was Herodotus the first Orientalist?

What is common to an Indian mole in Pakistan, an international arms agent and an alcohol mogul in North India? Many, many would be all those who have corruption as their common denominator. A classical target of the utopian dreams of the Enlightenment Century, corruption is, four hundred years later, ubiquitous, present in multiple and complex forms all around the globe…