Reflections

You said:   The Weight of Where One Stands A Play in Two Acts   Style: Magical Realism ACT ONE – The Choice oThe Choice of the Squaref the Square Scene: The living room of an Iranian diaspora family in Los Angeles. A Persian rug. Books in Farsi, English, French. A large window that occasionally becomes something else. Time behaves badly here. The Narrator enters, holding a remote control that doesn’t belong to anything. NARRATOR Welcome. This is Los Angeles—where revolutions are streamed, paused, and debated over tea. This family has escaped borders, but borders have not escaped them. Watch closely. Everyone here believes they are right. That is what makes them dangerous. (He clicks the remote. The family comes alive.) FATTANEH You’re telling me Minnesota and Iran are morally equivalent? That’s obscene. PEJMAN No. I’m saying  distance  isn’t a moral exemption. Two people were killed here—by a system that also wants me gone. DR. HAGHIGHATJOO Systems do not kill. ...

Dear sir, Incomplete knowledge becomes dangerous when it is mixed with carelessness, prejudice, and a touch of superstition. These tendencies unfortunately permeate your pseudo-philosophical commentary, especially in your implicit assumptions about Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, his notion of language-games, and—crucially—his views on mathematics, probability, and randomness. These areas are not separate strands of Wittgenstein’s thought; they are deeply interconnected, and misunderstanding one leads inevitably to misunderstanding the others. This is precisely what occurs in your discussion, even if you never mention these subjects explicitly. You begin with a mistaken belief that each phenomenon must have a single, correct definition. Wittgenstein spent his entire later philosophy dismantling this notion. Whether we speak of “number,” “probability,” “randomness,” or “art,” none of these concepts has a fixed essence. Their meanings arise from the practices—mathematical, scienti...

  Dear   Sir , Imperfect or superficial knowledge is indeed dangerous—especially in the 21st century, where a growing industry of pseudo-philosophical content dresses itself in comforting parables, therapeutic narratives, yoga-and-meditation clichés, and pop-Buddhist imagery. Presenting such materials as “philosophy” is not merely naïve; it is often a symptom of deeper intellectual and psychological discomfort disguised as wisdom. To begin with, academic affiliation is not a guarantee of insight. Teaching at a university neither confers philosophical sophistication nor validates sweeping claims. Your praise of this approach rests heavily on two notions—“the primacy of direct experience” and “critical understanding”—which are philosophically far more contested than you suggest. From Plato to Kant, rationalists have demonstrated the impossinality of pure, unmediated experience. Modern science reinforces this: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle underlines the structural limits of...

    Introduction A considerable lacuna persists in Western Quranic exegesis concerning the symbolic dimensions of the  Houri  or  Hur al-'ayn  (often rendered as "virgins" or "maidens"). Despite the Quran's explicit invocation of parable ( mathal ) as a primary mode of theological discourse—a rhetorical strategy explicitly articulated in Quranic hermeneutics—many Western commentators have remained confined to literalist interpretation, thereby foreclosing access to the deeper symbolic registers these images contain. This interpretive impoverishment stands in marked contrast to the rich allegorical traditions of Arabic and Persian Sufi exegesis, which have long recognized the pedagogical and mystical significance embedded within such imagery. The present inquiry proceeds from the conviction that the symbolic vocabulary of the maiden figure, deeply embedded within Western literary and cultural traditions, furnishes an indispensable key to unlocking the Qurani...