Hyder Husain Arastu

I am a doctoral student at the University of South Florida, and I hold a bachelor’s degree in political science and philosophy. My primary work concerns intersections of thought across the history of philosophy. It is deeply influenced by the Italian thinker Giambattista Vico. My encounter with his La Scienza Nuova fundamentally changed how I engage with thought as a whole: I no longer see philosophical works as static texts, but as organic and dynamic ones. Approaching philosophy imaginatively has allowed me to see beyond what words merely put forward. I take seriously Vico’s dictum, verum ipsum factum, and understand truth as made.

With this orientation, I approach ancient, early modern, and continental thinkers imaginatively, looking for intersections (topoi) within their thought and attempting to recreate it, since that is the only way I may know it. For how could I claim knowledge of that which I cannot reproduce for myself? My goal, then, is to be a poet in the word’s true sense, encapsulated by the Greek ποιητής (maker).

My poetry—my dissertation—is an imaginative reconstruction of the history of philosophy that seeks to uncover the conditions for the possibility of moral assertions. In a Levinasian spirit, I intuit that the answer lies in treating ethics as pre-eminent. This seems consistent with Plato, who says that the Good is ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας (beyond being). Our failure to recognize this stems from our failure to think imaginatively—the only mode of thought capable of grasping what is prior to reflective thought. In attempting to reduce ethics to the rational, we have let go of it, trying, as it were, to describe shadows without reference to light.

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