Writing

Three things live here. The senior thesis. The course-derived essays it’s standing on. And the newsletter, which is the practical wing of the same thinking.

A Compass to an Absurd Existence — senior thesis

My senior thesis at Bard. Philosophy and Politics. Submitted April 29, 2026. Two further chapters extending the argument going out in late July 2026.

The thesis braids three thinkers — Nietzsche, Camus, Arendt — into a working compass for living with dignity when meaning isn’t handed to you. It’s a philosophy thesis but written for a reader who isn’t necessarily a philosopher, because the questions are bigger than the field that owns them.

The chapter map (excerpts publishing as they’re cleared):

Full PDF on request after the July chapters land. Email writing@zafarkhil.com.

Course-derived essays

The thesis is the umbrella. Underneath it are the shorter papers I wrote across four years that worked the same problems from narrower angles. These are real undergraduate essays — written for a course, graded by a professor, not retrofitted to be Substack content. They are uneven on purpose. They’re how I actually thought through the material.

The Right to Die! — Berkowitz, Dignity and the Human Rights Tradition, 2025

The Arendt-on-rightlessness paper. ~8,600 words. The claim: Arendt’s right to have rights does not guarantee safety, but it is still a real answer, because it restores political membership where totalitarianism makes people rightless. Dignity, on her account, is not a secret thing inside a person. It happens in the world — a person able to appear in front of others and be heard as a speaker and an actor. When that public space collapses, rights collapse too. The phrase “human rights” became for all concerned the evidence of hopeless idealism or fumbling, feeble-minded hypocrisy. That sentence describes 1940s Europe and August 2021 Kabul with equal precision.

The paper also asks the harder question: when rights have failed, when the state has collapsed, when no political community is willing or able to confer membership — does the person have the right to refuse a degraded life? That’s the right to die part. I argue it cautiously and without conclusion. The question is more honest than the answer.

This is the keystone essay. The thesis sits on it.

The Right to Have Rights — Berkowitz, same course, earlier

The historical-genealogy paper. ~1,800 words. Traces dignity from Roman dignitas (where dignity meant to be worth something and was measured by material wealth), through the Christian universalization (where dignity becomes a property of birth, not of property), through the Islamic prophetic tradition that disciplined the desert tribes of Arabia within a generation, into the post-WWII Universal Declaration that tried to make dignity globally legible. The argument: dignity is durable when a political community enforces it. When the community collapses, dignity collapses with it. Dignity exists as an inherent human value, but only when all humans respect it or have been made to. That’s the line I keep coming back to. Made-to is the operative phrase. The right to have rights is what gets you back into the made-to category.

Philosophy of Language final paper — Hagberg, 2025

~2,400 words. On truth, sentences, and metaphor. Following Rorty’s argument in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity — truth cannot be out there, cannot exist independently of the human mind, because sentences cannot so exist — the paper argues that truth in language is always made, never simply found, but that this does not make it arbitrary. What it does is shift the burden from correspondence to a world we cannot directly see to coherence within a community of speakers who have to agree, again and again, what counts as true. I follow Hacking on language games, Wittgenstein on the impossibility of private language, and end with a section on metaphor — why metaphor is not decoration but cognitive labor that literal speech cannot perform.

This is the paper that’s most useful to me now, working on AI translation. The whole field of low-resource-language NLP runs on the assumption that translation is a literal-meaning-preservation problem. It isn’t. It’s a metaphor-preservation problem, an idiom-preservation problem, a community-of-use-preservation problem. The Pashto word for guest is not the English word for guest. The Dari word for honor is not the Iranian-Persian word for honor. Those gaps are where the real work lives.

Truth and Politics — Berkowitz, on Arendt’s essay of the same name

A short close-reading exercise. The line that organized everything: freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. Arendt is making two claims at once. The first is that democracy fails when facts become contested. The second is subtler — facts are inherently fragile in politics because they depend on testimony, memory, and acceptance by others. They are not naturally stable; they are stable only when a political community holds them stable. Once you can deny what happened — once you can say the war did not happen, the genocide did not happen, the election was not lost — you have unmade the conditions under which political opinion is even possible. That paper is two years old and it gets more relevant every month.

Constitutional Law midterm — Spring 2024

On Sotomayor’s dissent in Dobbs and the doctrine of stare decisis. Made me less romantic about American institutions and more interested in the actual mechanics by which they hold or don’t.

The Multidimensional Legitimization of Authoritarian Regimes

Course paper on the soft-authoritarianism question — how regimes that look democratic on the surface manufacture legitimacy without ever holding contested elections that they could plausibly lose. The text I leaned on most was a synthesis of Levitsky and Way on competitive authoritarianism, plus some Pareto on elite circulation. Useful framing for a refugee, since it explains a lot about why the country I left looked stable until it suddenly didn’t.

Other papers (publishing as they’re reviewed)

If you want any of these in full, email writing@zafarkhil.com and tell me which one. I’ll send the PDF.

Kochi — the newsletter

Subscribe at kochi.beehiiv.com →

Kochi (کوچی) is the Pashto word for nomad. It’s also the right name for a newsletter aimed at diaspora operators — people who live across two languages, two countries, and a lot of context-switching, and who are now figuring out how AI tools fit into their work and their lives.

What you’ll get if you subscribe:

What you won’t get: hustle-bro energy, “10x your output” listicles, AI-doom or AI-hype, recycled Twitter takes. There’s enough of that already.

The cadence is roughly weekly. The list is small and intentionally so. If it’s useful to you, forward it.

Why both registers

People sometimes ask why I’m writing a newsletter about AI tools and a philosophy thesis on existentialism at the same time. The honest answer is they’re the same project from different angles.

The thesis is about how you orient yourself when nothing is given. The essays underneath it are about what dignity, truth, and rights look like when the institutions that used to confer them have failed. The newsletter is about how you actually do that work on a Tuesday morning when you have a translation job due and a customer call at 3 and a paper to finish. Philosophy without practice is decoration. Practice without philosophy is just running on momentum until something breaks. I’m trying to do both because I think they need each other.

If you want only the practical stuff, the newsletter is enough. If you want the foundations under the practical stuff, the essays and the thesis fill it in. Either is a valid way to read this site.

Subscribe to Kochi · Email me about the thesis