Ishaan Saxena

Pasolini's work as a civic poet has always been very close to my heart. His work is reminiscent of a lot of literature produced on the subcontinent, particularly during the Progressive Writer's Movement, and shares sentiments with that of poets like Amrita Pritam. Email request for access.

शिकायत मुझे भी है [I Have Some Grievances Too] by Harishankar Parsai

Hindi to English • Essays

Harishankar Parsai was a modernist Hindi writer, known and beloved for his satirical takes on major issues in post-colonial India. His collections of essays "शिकायत मुझे भी है" is an excellent reflection of his ideas and criticism of Indian society, one that has much relevance for the contemporary world as well.

archive—

2020—

The Making of Words

29th Match, 2020 • Web Development

A post about how I created this blog - and reduced the amount of effort I had to make the three times every year when I did have a new blog entry. All with just front-end JavaScript, Markdown, and some fun parsing tricks.

2019—

The Conflict Between Utility and Justice

19th February, 2019 • Ethics | Political Theory

In his 1861 book Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill establishes his doctrine of utility, which he calls the Greatest Happiness Principle. This principle seems to be in conflict with our understanding of justice, insofar as actions made in adherence to the principle of utility often appear to be opposed to what a just action may seem like.

Transcendental Idealism and the Limits of Knowledge

22nd January, 2019 • Epistemology | Metaphysics

In several works, Immanuel Kant presents a doctrine which he calls transcendental idealism. Kant asserts that we create empirical intuitions of things through our sensory capacities and intuitions about space-time. Further, he argues that it is only possible to gain knowledge about objects through these empirical intuitions.

2018—

The Problem with Memory Theories of Personal Identity

22nd March, 2018 • Philosophy of Mind

In his book, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke provides a non-substantial psychological account of personal identity. For Locke, the sameness of consciousness is both necessary and sufficient for the relation of personal identity to obtain. While this theory stands to be reasonable for most situations, there are several inconsistencies encountered when using memory as a phenomenon to determine personal identity.

Limitations of Cartesian Dualism

13th February, 2018 • Metaphysics | Philosophy of Mind

The modern theories of dualism, centric to the study of the philosophy of mind, principally find their origin in Descartes’ Meditations. In his writings, Descartes asserts that there exists a separation between the mind and the body. He states that the mind and the body clearly have different essences or principal attributes, and thus cannot be identical to one another.

2017—

The Importance of Machine Ethics for Artificial Moral Agents

7th November, 2017 • Ethics | Artificial Intelligence

With the quick advent of Artificial Intelligence-based technology, we are experiencing a new era in the history of humanity. From voice assistants, to search engines, most pieces of technology that we use are forms of basic AI. The idea of machines which can think logically and abstractly, and act on their own as artificial moral agents, creates a lot of potential ethical problems.

Smart Ways to Inform - Dumb Ways to Die

17th September, 2017 • Rhetorical Analysis

Only seldom you would find a public service announcement campaign that is interesting enough to be watched, and rewatched over and over again. Such a rarity is the rail safety campaign put out by Metro Trains in Melbourne, Australia. The campaign, an animated music video titled Dumb Ways to Die, was released in November 2012, and soon became an internet sensation for its sheer brilliance.

Existentialism and Ethics

1st May, 2017 • Metaphysics | Ethics

Existentialism is a term that refers to a period of intellectual history concerned with the nature of the human condition. With the development of some of its key ideas in a particularly dreadful period of history, and its roots in the examination of man’s position in, his experience of and his relation with the universe, it seems to have a profound connection with the moral aspect of human existence.

Synecdoche, New York - An Investigation of Being

22nd March, 2017 • Existentialism | Film Analysis

Charlie Kaufman’s cinematic masterpiece ‘Synecdoche, New York’ is in many ways an investigation of life and Being through various motifs prevalent through the one hundred and twenty-four minutes of the movie. Kaufman tries to answer the question posed by Martin Heidegger ‘what does it mean to exist?’

2016—

Free Will and Determinism

14th December, 2016 • Metaphysics

Literature has been infused with stories about events unfolding through ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’ for a greater period of the history. These stories suggest that the development of certain incidents is a result of causal chains beyond the control of human choice. Such a viewpoint about the way events are caused is often termed as ‘Causal Deterministic’. These viewpoints have often worried Philosophers due to the kinds of consequences they might entail.