Akeel Bilgrami’s Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s “What Kind of Creatures Are We?”

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…

Occidentalism, The Very Idea: An Essay on The Enlightenment and Enchantment

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…

Akeel Bilgrami: A Reply to Robbins, Jager, Smith, Levine, Manikkalingam, and Mehta

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…