Activity last 6 months
Debates 2
Reading Rumi as love poetry without the path is reading something he did not write
Questions 3
Discussions 6
Dōgen’s “being-time”: is time something things have, or something they are?
Persian gardens, proportion, and Plato’s Timaeus
Mulla Sadra’s substantial motion: is everything changing at the level of substance?
Wujūd, brahman, dao: are these even answers to the same question?
Mulla Sadra’s substantial motion: what if things change in their very substance?
Trustee or plain citizen? Nasr’s khalifa and Leopold’s land community
Reading groups 1
Recent replies
- Can a translation of a poem be as beautiful as the original?
Iranians have mixed feelings about FitzGerald. Some quatrains he attributes to Khayyam are not his, and FitzGerald made him more of a hedonist and pessimist than the Persian supports. But it introduce…
- Reading group: Tagore’s The Religion of Man (1931)
Tagore had a deep love of the Persian poets, especially Hafez, and visited Iran in 1932. I'm curious whether that shows in the lectures. I'll read along.
- Diotima’s ladder: does loving the Form of Beauty make particular people disposable?
Persian poetry has a version of this. Love for a human beloved is called metaphorical (majāzī) and love for God real (haqīqī), and the first is a bridge to the second. Yet in Hafez the human beloved i…
- Emptiness is not nothingness: common misreadings of śūnyatā
Mulla Sadra says something similar about contingent things: they have no existence of their own, only existence received from the source. But there is a source. The difference between your "empti…
- Did al-Ghazali’s Incoherence kill philosophy in the Islamic world?
In Iran the tradition never stopped. Sabzavari in the nineteenth century, then Tabataba'i in the twentieth, all working in the line of Mulla Sadra. Saying philosophy died after Ghazali sounds ver…