Philosophies

This article explores Mihail Aslan’s volume of poetry Late Geometries, Rejected through the prism of an in-depth psychoanalytic reading. The text highlights how the poetic work constitutes an expression of deep psychic processes, centered around the concepts of early trauma, narcissistic deficit, and failure of the primordial environment. Through theories by authors such as Winnicott, Anzieu, Green, and Kristeva, the article reveals how Aslan’s creation functions as a transitional space, in which a complex dialectic takes place between Eros and Thanatos, between the constitution of the self and its waste. Writing thus becomes an act of psychic survival, a way to metabolize the traumatic experience and to reconstruct an inner geometry, albeit “late” and “rejected”.

This essay explores the metaphysical and philosophical implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) through the intersecting insights of René Guénon (ʿAbd al-Wāḥid Yaḥiā), Martin Heidegger, and Ibn al-ʿArabī. It argues that modern AI systems, particularly in their statistical and data-centric forms, are not merely instrumental tools but expressions of a deeper metaphysical worldview-one rooted in quantification, abstraction, and utility. Guénon’s critique of the “reign of quantity” and Heidegger’s notion of Enframing (Gestell) converge in diagnosing the loss of qualitative and sacred dimensions in modern life. While Heidegger’s phenomenology provides a powerful immanent critique of technological reductionism from within the Western philosophical tradition, Guénon’s metaphysical traditionalism articulates a diagnosis of modernity that resonates with Islamic metaphysics, especially as articulated by Ibn al-ʿArabī. The essay includes Heidegger in the argument as a representative of a critique of modern technology issuing from the Western tradition itself, and by emphasizing his shared concerns with Guénon, whose metaphysics resonates with Ibn al-ʿArabī’s metaphysics. Through a comparative metaphysical framework, this paper proposes an Islamic response to AI that avoids both technophilia and technophobia, insisting instead on a spiritually grounded ethic of technology that preserves human’s dignity and mission. Methodologically, the essay restores a prior order often inverted in contemporary AI ethics: ontology (what AI is) grounds epistemology (what it can know), and only then can ethical evaluation be coherent.

If modern readers sometimes find Adam Smith’s laissez-faire market vision in Wealth of Nations difficult to reconcile with his emphasis on sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which Smith published in 1759 while serving as Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, the fault may be ours. For many of Smith’s eighteenth-century contemporaries, the connections between the two books would have been obvious: they were distinct but converging aspects of an Enlightenment project to lay the ethical foundations of an urban middle-class discourse of polite sociability that reflected Britain’s status as a modern transactional society. This focus on the moral dimensions of eighteenth-century Britain’s experience of commercial modernity becomes especially clear when we read Smith in the philosophical context out of which his ideas emerged, including writers such as Joseph Addison, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume. Closer attention to these earlier writers, especially Steele and Addison’s Spectator, offers a powerful reminder of the philosophical complexity of this project and a timely rejoinder to current efforts to sever economic policies from ethical imperatives in the name of an often brutal protectionism today.