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Fauna of Mirrors , in the style of Magritte. AI image   “Both kingdoms, the specular and the human, lived in harmony; you could come and go through mirrors.” — Jorge Luis Borges, “Fauna of Mirrors” 1. Two Kingdoms Separated by the Mirror In “Fauna of Mirrors,” from The Book of Imaginary Beings , Jorge Luis Borges describes two distinct worlds: the human world and the world behind the mirrors. Their inhabitants, colours, and forms were different, yet the two kingdoms lived in harmony. Mirrors provided passages between them, allowing their inhabitants to move from one world to the other without erasing their differences. This arrangement does not last. One night, the mirror creatures invade the human world. After a bloody war, the Yellow Emperor defeats them, imprisons them behind the mirrors, and forces them to reproduce human actions and gestures. Their former freedom gives way to compulsory imitation. Yet Borges’s account does not end with their defeat: a day will come...

1. Find the Odd One Out Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jorge Luis Borges . Which of these four names seems out of place? The first three belong to the history of French philosophy and theory; the fourth was an Argentine writer whose fiction explores labyrinths, imaginary encyclopedias, and infinite libraries. Asked to identify the odd one out, most readers would probably choose Borges. Yet the opening of Foucault’s The Order of Things complicates that answer. “This book first arose out of a passage in Borges,” he writes, recalling the laughter that shattered, as he read it, “all the familiar landmarks of my thought”—the assumptions shaped by his age and intellectual world (Foucault, 1994, p. xv). The remark presents a work of fiction as the starting point of a philosophical investigation. Borges had unsettled the coordinates through which Foucault was accustomed to think, helping him recognize a problem that would become central to his book. Foucault wa...

1. What Are We Asking When We Ask What Something Is? “I did not bid you tell me one or two of the many pious actions but that form itself that makes all pious actions pious.” — Plato, Euthyphro, 6d, trans. G. M. A. Grube. Socrates makes this demand of Euthyphro, who has come to the Athenian court to prosecute his own father over the death of a servant. Confident that he understands piety, Euthyphro offers his own conduct as an example: prosecuting someone who has committed an injustice, even when that person is a relative, is a pious act. Socrates wants to know what piety is, however, and an example of pious conduct does not answer that question. The difficulty is familiar. We can recognize an action as courageous, just, or pious without being able to explain what makes it so. Our judgments may be reliable in particular circumstances, yet we may struggle to articulate the grounds on which we make them. Socrates’ demand asks Euthyphro to account for the quality itself, so that his...