Night School

A new debate series organised by the British High Commission, KL, and the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus is the subject of this episode. Held 20 March 2014, at the Islamic Arts Museum, Kuala Lumpur, the debate was titled “No Pain, No Gain: Cutting Subsidies is Necessary For Malaysia’s Future Prosperity”. The panelists were Senator Senator and Cabinet Minister Abdul Wahid Omar, Parliamentarian Ong Kian Ming, and economists Manokaran Mottain and Teo Wing Leong.

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The 'Sekolah Falsafah' initiative has explored a plethora of philosophers from the classic Plato to anti-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Held on weekday nights, the students engage in critical discourse, probing the arguments of different thinkers across the centuries. Drawing to its final class after five months, we talk to the 'Sekolah Falsafah' graduates on the appreciation and application of philosophy as well as its structured learning environment and what the country could do to accommodate this intellectual tradition.

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“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world; Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind ...” So starts the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a Charter that defines membership in the powerful multi-national organization called the United Nations. The question remains, do its claims hold up to philosophical scrutiny?

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How do we frame the debate about democracy and democratic transition? Why do we fear the emergence of religious voices in the democratic game? The Cordoba Foundation says that it wants “to provide a strong voice of tolerance and reason in promoting dialogue and a rapprochement between Islam and the West”. We speak to its founder to better focus on the contours of an important contemporary debate.

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Friedrich Nietzsche is one of Night School’s favourite philosophers – critical of received wisdom, his provocations has forced thinkers to re-examine the very foundations of Western thought. In this episode we examine the suggestion that justice and punishment is a compromise with revenge. And also consider Nietzsche’s proposal that “forgetting” is the only way to address the question of justice.

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A year ago William Roff, author of ‘The Origins of Malay Nationalism’ died. A substantial body of work on the question of Islam followed his PhD thesis on the politics of the Peninsular. Sumit Mandal studied under Roff at Columbia University. He presents Roff’s essay “Islam obscured ? Some Reflections on Studies of Islam & Society in Southeast Asia” published in the journal Archipel in 1985.

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For much of modern history the work of anthropologists and the stuff of museums was a natural fit. Displays of human evolution, society and culture presented in neat, order narratives in text, dioramas and artifacts encased on glass vitrines. But for decades now that relationship has been interrogated and refigured, changing both the study of people and cultures and well as its presentation to the public. We explore.

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“The existence of the things qua commodities, and the value-relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising there from. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. This I call the Fetishism ... of commodities,” wrote Karl Marx. This week we explore the consequence of a world in which things have a life of their own.

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“The important thing is not what we write, but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously,” said James Joyce in a conversation with Arthur Power. How can story-telling be dangerous and how can it resolve the environmental and economic the world finds itself in.

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“I think what we need is a return to a belief not in liberty, because that is easily converted into something else, as we saw, but in equality. Equality, which is not the same as sameness. Equality of access to information, equality of access to knowledge, equality of access to education, equality of access to power and to politics. We should be more concerned than we are about inequalities of opportunity, whether between young and old or between those with different skills or from different regions of a country. It is another way of talking about injustice,” said Tony Judt, historian and author of “Ill Fares the Land”.

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