A new book titled “All Things Are Empty of Philosophy” by the Iraqi writer and researcher Mashhad Al-Allaf has been released by Ramena Publications in London.
اضافة اعلان
According to the publisher:
“In this book, philosophy emerges as an effect of life rather than mere reflection upon it. It is as if the author redefines philosophy through his own personal journey spanning Baghdad, America, and Seville — where memory intertwines with solitude, and the philosophical question becomes a way of life that resists dissolution through awareness and oblivion through remembrance.”
The book is both an intellectual and biographical journey, narrating the story of a consciousness shaped amid the tension between myth and science, spirit and matter, war and exile. The personal and collective intersect as the author recalls the early days of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Baghdad and its accompanying revivalist dream—before wars and oppressive regimes shattered it—transforming the academic dream into a question about the relevance of thought in a world racing toward dehumanization and technology.
Its chapters are divided into several sections in which Al-Allaf revisits the Faustian spirit, representing the peak of Western ambition toward knowledge and immortality, and contrasts it with the fate of humanity that has replaced salvation with limitless experimentation. The Faust myth becomes a mirror for modern man—one who sold his soul under the illusion of scientific power and control. He also views the Iraqi experience as a Faustian spirit trapped between faith in science and the collapse of hope.
Al-Allaf opens a philosophical reflection on the relationship between humans and technology through the myth of Tithonus—the being granted immortality but deprived of the ability to die—condemned to live an empty eternity. He raises questions about the destiny of humankind when swallowed by machines, becoming an extension of its own algorithms, and when the mind turns into a mechanical mediator between memory and forgetfulness. This vision intersects with modern thinkers such as Ted Kaczynski and Ray Kurzweil, as well as with Plato’s Cave allegory, which the author reinterprets in light of the digital experience.
Al-Allaf writes of the soul veiled in the dust of the earth, of philosophy as a practice of mortality and serenity, of happiness born from idleness when it turns into awareness, and of reading as salvation from nothingness. He traverses through Nietzsche, Dionysus, and Gilgamesh to rediscover myth as the memory of the soul—a reminder that meaning never perishes, it only transforms.
The book spans 174 pages of medium format.
Among the author’s other philosophical and intellectual works are:
“Original Texts in Islamic Philosophy: From Al-Kindi to Muhammad Iqbal”
“Locke’s Philosophy of Science and Metaphysics”
“The Operational Philosophy of Science between Einstein and Bergmann”
