Night School

Are liberty and security inherently incompatible? Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher thought so. Backed by his view of mankind and the world, he conceptualized the Leviathan, a state that would be sure to secure peace. JSharaad Kuttan and Ahmad Fuad Rahmat explore the themes, arguments and questions behind this idea.

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Utilitarianism, is the ethical theory of pleasure. It asks several questions of us, and we in turn can ask questions of it: Why should the sentient pleasure of all be the basis of our actions? What are the risks therein? Are all pleasures of the same value? Ahmad Fuad Rahmat walks us through the now oft quoted formulation that we should be striving for the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

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“The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.” This is the formulation of the notion of the public sphere by 20th century German social theorist Jurgen Habermas. A notion that has drawn a substantial debate.

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Propoaganda is a much degraded term for a form of communication. From its earliest use in the dissemination of doctrine of the Catholic Church, to war-time communications of nation states to the present idea that all information systems have their propaganda effect. In a free-wheeling conversation, your Night School hosts set about charting the perimeters of the term.

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Al-Ghazali is arguably the greatest Muslim thinker of all time. In this episode, we reflect on Deliverance from Error, his spiritual biography, whereby he details his discovery of the path to The Truth. Join us as our special guest this week, Sheikh Yahya Rhodus, takes us through this text and its relevance for contemporary times.

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“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives,” wrote Jean-Franscois Lyotard in his work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. His insights into the place of the university in modern society, his attempts to think about ethics in the wake of this 'incredulity' and finally, the demands his work makes on us as readers – and the pleasure of that struggle – are all in the mix in this week’s episode. Sean Matthews, a literary scholar, leads the discussion.

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A man who straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, the Austrian poet Rainer-Maria Rilke has been taken up in recent years by the New Age Movement. In his slim volume "Letters to a Young Poet" in which he advises a young man on matters of the aesthetic Rilke reaches larger universal concerns about life and suffering. Embrace the pain, he says.

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“Postcards and postcolonialism are two things I advocate for people who can't afford to go on vacation,” quipped humourist Bauvard. Needless to day there are some serious questions that postcolonial theory and its related concepts address that are relevant for us to be cognizant of especially on during the run up to Merdeka. 

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A constitution is the moral bedrock of any state. It defines essentially what it can and can't do to its citizens. In this episode, we explore this notion more, with particular emphasis on the concept of constitutionalism or limited government.  We reflect on its most fundamental questions while also situating them in the Malaysian context.

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“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use,”  wrote Soren Kierkegaard, 19th Century Danish philosopher. This week we look at his tome “Either/Or” and the three stages of life plotted out in this work as well as “Fear and Trembling” with award-winning documentary maker, Boon Kia Meng.

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