Please join us for the lecture "Al-Fārābī and the philosophy of naming: Gaza and genocide" with Dr. Rosabel Ansari from Stony Brook University.

 

Abstract: What's in a name? Our choice of identifying and naming phenomena in the world is at once a metaphysical and political act. In medieval Islam, the classical Aristotelian philosopher Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (d. 950) developed a sophisticated philosophy of language that accounts for the natural process by which language communities identify, intellectually grasp, and then name the realities we perceive in the world as well as the ways literary, scientific, intercommunal and political currents impact this process. The craft of naming, as Fārābī calls it, is at once metaphysical, and hence reflective of what truly is, but it is also the result of human volition and politics that govern our use of linguistic norms. This talk will also look at how Fārābī's philosophy of naming can be applied to questions of naming today, in particular the naming of genocide in Gaza. What is at stake philosophically in naming genocide and in identifying the loss of human life in Gaza as such? Ultimately, this talk will conclude, the question is about what type of community we want to be.

 

5:30pm lecture