Return to Haifa

Return to Haifa (1982) is a film in which the political element of international relations is translated into personal terms on the levels of family and individual people. The establishment of Israel by the UN is depicted in the film as being accomplished not only incompetently, but in negligence of likely human suffering. In fact, the suffering of the indigenous population may have been intended, given the operative attitude towards those people as animals. That the human being can be so dehumanizing in action as well as belief ultimately makes victims of all of us, even across artificial divides. This is precisely what the film depicts, with the victims being the active characters while the real culprits remain for the most part off-camera. The viewer is left with a sense of futility that can be undone by widening one’s view to include the antagonists, who are not passive. It is not as if fate inexorably brought about the Nakba (or even the scale of the atrocities in Gaza in the next century, which, as the film was made in 1982, cannot be said to be anticipated by the filmmaker—though perhaps it could have been).

The full essay is at "Return to Haifa."

Is the Hindu Bhagavadgita Monotheist?

Even though the Bhagavadgita is just a small part of the Mahabharata Hindu epic, the popularity of the former book in Hindu households has led to it being referred to as the Hindu Bible. This likeness should be taken at face value, for the contents in the Gita are very different than the theological context of the Bible, whether just the Torah, the Talmud, or the New Testament. Even though the virtue of kindness or love issuing out in compassion to other people is a shared descriptor of the Hindu Lord Krishna, which is the highest god in the Gita, and the Christian Lord Jesus, the ideational dissimilarities between the Gita and the Bible should not be glossed over. Put another way, not even the symbol of the mandala, which Joseph Campbell includes as the religious archetype of wholeness in The Power of Myth, should dispel the notion that religions contain unique and thus different philosophical and theological ideas and even just stances.

The full essay is at "Is the Hindu Bhagavadgita Monotheist?"

Presence

The medium of film has great potential in playing with ontology, the branch of philosophy that asks (and tries to answer) the fundamental question: What really exists?  Put another way, what does it mean for something to exist. The being of “to be,” as opposed to not-be may be thought of, can be labeled as existential ontology. Whereas in the Hindu Upanishads, being itself is Brahman, which pervades everything in the realm of appearance, the Abrahamic religions posit the existence of a deity that creates existence and thus is its condition or foundation. Creation ex nihilo (i.e., from nothing) is another way of grasping why the Abrahamic god is not existence, or being, itself, for that which brought (and sustains) existence into (and as) being cannot logically be existence itself. Fortunately for most viewers who lead normal lives, the film, Presence (2024), does not hinge on such abstractions; the salience of ontology, or what is real beyond our daily experiences (in the realm of appearance), is merely implied in there being an entity that intriguingly is only a presence. It is real to both the main characters in the film’s world and to viewers of the film because of the inclusion of supernatural effects that the entity is able to register in the perception of the family living in the house. Crucially, such effects do not overwhelm the subtlety in how the presence is known to exist (i.e., be real). In this way, Presence succeeds where Poltergeist (1982) and Ghost (1990) do not: Presence is more philosophically intriguing and thought-provoking than the latter two films, and is thus a better example of the potential that the medium of film has in engaging viewers in philosophy. Being less oriented to visually titilating supernatural effects, Presence can better engage the mind philosophically. 

The full essay is at "Presence."

On the U.S. President as Chief Executive

As the chief executive of the U.S. Government, the president is tasked with executing the law—the passage thereof involving both the Congress and the presidency. It follows that a president cannot legally stand in the way of appropriated federal funding of projects and programs once such allocations have become law. For otherwise, a president could simply ignore appropriations passed by the Congress and signed into law by a previous president. The powers of the unitary executive would reach dictatorial proportions. Within roughly one week of being sworn into office for his second term in 2025, U.S. President Trump decided to pause all foreign aid, and “grants, loans and other federal assistance . . . to ensure spending is consistent with Trump’s priorities.”[1] Those priorities, I submit, would properly have influence on bills in Congress that were not yet laws, as per the legislative veto-power of the presidency and the ability of a president to put pressure on members of Congress by speaking persuasively directly to the American people. The value of leadership available to a presiding role should not be ignored. In terms of symbolic leadership befitting a presider in chief, refusing to enforce laws sends the wrong signal. To be sure, delaying rather than cancelling funding that has already been appropriated as law may fall within reasonable discretion that goes with the executing, and thus executive, function. However, the size, or magnitude, of the federal spending being held up but not cancelled may test the test of reasonableness. This may also be so if the political dimension—that is, the salience of political judgment in the issues involved—is significant.

The full essay is at "On the U.S. President as Chief Executive."

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1. James Fitzgerald and Ana Faguy, “White House Pauses Federal Grants and Loans,” BBC.com, January 28, 2025.