Io Blair-Freese – philosopher, international development pioneer, and lover of maps and computers – guides us through “The Zahir” and “An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain” by Jorge Luis Borges. We talk about idealist philosophy, inevitable religions, identity, the power of attention, the limitations of attention, and the limitlessness of language.

A few notes and links:

• Buy Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions
• “The Zahir” PDF
• “An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain” PDF (Note that this is a different translation than those in the Collected Fictions that I’ve recommended)
• The counterfeit Zahir (Reddit discussion)
• Idealism on Wikipedia