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Wael Al-Mahdi (2010) Ritual has existed for as long as humanity has been up to its usual business of mastering self and environment. At the beginning of era of modernity, and with the spread of scientific thinking, myth, ritual and metaphysics were jettisoned, with intellectuals declaring that humanity had outgrown its primitive tools that “explained” [...]
Wael Al-Mahdi (2010) “I can’t believe I’m here” is a common cry from the overwhelmed traveler, who can hardly believe that although he had left home a few hours ago, he is now suddenly faced with fresh vistas of experience he had never imagined. He dreams of the unknown world that works just fine without [...]
Wael Al-Mahdi (2010) You said, and your are most famous for this, that God is dead. But why, in all honesty, did you make the same mistake which you so perceptively accused other philosophers of committing? Why, to put in more precisely, did you overgeneralize your own value-feeling (your own morality, even) into such [...]
Self-awareness is genius. The world of form. Plato idealized, the Buddha illusionized, the Gnostics demonized, Nietzsche aestheticized, Jung archetypified, the behaviorists denied, and the evolutionary psychologists instinctualized.
Wael Al-Mahdi (2010) If the goal is to become conscious, I can surely do this on my own, without the mediation of dreams? I’m not discounting the importance of the unconscious here, but if can hardly understand my dreams, especially the more mythological ones, how can I expect to gain any consciousness-expanding insights from them? [...]
Wael Al-Mahdi (2010) I saw the image, large and framed in black, of a well-known historical figure who is noted for his having been martyred in a very bloody way. The image was the kind that was usually held aloft in mourning processions. It had a stylized painting of his countenance. He looked me from [...]
Wael Al-Mahdi (2010) Today we understand much more about human language than did the philologists of past centuries, but there are still many questions that are yet to be answered. For example, we are still not certain how language originated. We also have the fact that many of our concepts about the external world (and [...]
Wael Al-Mahdi Earlier this year I traveled with my brother to the Arab Gulf Emirate of Dubai. This Beta World City is sufficiently well-known not to warrant an introduction. In Iran, young people save up their low purchasing-power rials all year in order to spend a libertine holiday in “Dobey”. In Turkey, people are not likely to know Bahrain, but when [...]
Wael Al-Mahdi The Arabs reject democracy for as long as they can, and when they accept it they distort it. We fought the devil for millennia until we discovered we were fighting ourselves. A man in a village was caught reading a book. He became the laughing stock of the village. The most celebratory mood is [...]
Wael Al-Mahdi “The genius which runs into madness is no longer genius.” -Otto Weininger One of the lasting contributions of evolutionary psychology to our understanding of human nature is undoubtedly a list of human universals composed by Donald Brown. The list runs into the hunderds and includes: Actions under self-control distinguished from those not under [...]
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