by Akeel Bilgrami These lectures present a lifetime of reflection by a scientist of language on the broader implications of his scientific work. The omnibus title of the lectures, “What kind of creatures are we?” conveys just how broad the implications are meant to be. They cover an impressive range of fields: theoretical linguistics, cognitive…
by Akeel Bilgrami Arthur Danto has just died. In two places where Arthur worked for many decades — Columbia’s Philosophy Department and the Journal of Philosophy– there had always been a general feeling among us that much as he loved and laboured here, he found us too confining. This was a source of pride rather…
Editor's Note: Akeel Bilgrami has kindly given us permission to publish here the text of a lecture that he delivered at The New School and which is also included in the Chomsky Notebook collection of writings. by Akeel Bilgrami Though there is much radical –and often unpleasant– disagreement on the fundamental questions around academic freedom,…
by Akeel Bilgrami The notion of a miscellany fetches no particular interest, except in the light of its contrasting ideal of integrity. I don’t mean integrity in the moral sense–a person’s action keeping faith with her principles– but in the stricter sense of things being of a piece, being integrated rather than miscellaneous. The intellectual…
by Akeel Bilgrami It wouldn’t be too lofty to describe the extensive debate in many related disciplines over the last few decades about the inherited ideas and ideologies of the ‘Enlightenment’ as our intellectual efforts at self-understanding — in particular, our efforts to come to a more or less precise grip on the sense in…
I am grateful to the contributors to this web symposium on “Occidentalism, The Very Idea: An Essay on the Enlightenment and Enchantment”, (first published in Critical Inquiry, 2006) for having bothered to read my work and comment on it. I would like to apologize to them (and to Abbas Raza and Robin Varghese, the editors…
Abbas Raza: Would you say a little bit by way of reflections on September 11 five years later? Akeel Bilgrami: It’s hard to say anything about September 11 that hasn’t been said before, but some things need to be said again and again, so I am glad you’ve asked me this. In the first few…
Professor Akeel Bilgrami has kindly given 3 Quarks Daily permission to publish the text of a speech he gave at a memorial service for Edward W. Said on September 29, 2003. Professor Bilgrami is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanties at Columbia University. Professor Bilgrami went to…