Humanities desk
< February 5	<< Jan \| February \| Mar >>	February 7 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

February 6[edit]

Statue of Rafi Ahmed KidwaiShipraAbr (talk) 05:53, 6 February 2019 (UTC)[edit]

The statue of Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, Indian freedom fighter and politician, was originally placed at Rafi Marg in Delhi and later relocated inside Krishi Bhawan. What is the reason behind it?

I found a picture of it being moved in The Tribune, Saturday January 22, 2011, but the reason why remains obscure. Alansplodge (talk) 11:18, 7 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Is life alive?[edit]

Persononthinternet (talk) 16:37, 6 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Your question makes no sense. Perhaps our article at life can help you? Matt Deres (talk) 19:57, 6 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Life is indeed alive, by definition. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:26, 6 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If you want to pick nits, you could differentiate between the concept of life, and instances of it. The latter sure are alive, but is the former? It does evolve, but I don't think it has a metabolism. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 21:15, 6 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, some may be satisfied with a quick, shallow and definitive response. Others understand that shallow responses are deeply unsatisfying, and might prefer to struggle with mountains of metaphysical tomes and grapple with multitudes of mighty concepts before coming to any position, if they ever do. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:59, 6 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It is not a silly or grammatical question, and the answer to the question depends on how you define terms like "life" and "alive". This like "are viruses life?" and "are viruses alive?" are highly nuanced depending on what your criteria are for defining them. And you may not even get the same answer for both questions. What is life? itself is a question fraught with edge cases and categorical problems when answering satisfactorily. See Life#Definitions, especially the very first sentence of that section. --Jayron 32 00:38, 7 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It's actually a language question, as humans invented the word "life" and have since spent plenty of time trying to figure out what it is. Viruses may or may not fit our definition of our word "life", but they do what they do and they don't care what we call it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:21, 7 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

In the sense you are talking about, everything is a language question, so it's a meaningless point. This is not merely a language question, but it is more of a categorization question, and such questions depend first on the definitions you are using to create your categories, the problem is that categorization is hard; many criteria we create to define a category end up excluding stuff we agree is part of that category. Also, there are subtle shades of difference between related words. For example "life" verses "alive", one can easily come up with things that are part of the concept of "life" (writ large), but which may not be strictly "alive". It's these edge cases that can often be the most interesting, because they test the limits of our knowledge and force us to reconsider long-held assumptions and allow us to get a fuller picture of complex systems. --Jayron 32 13:46, 7 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well said. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:50, 7 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

See Use-mention distinction... -- AnonMoos (talk) 15:33, 7 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'd say it's more the distinction between an abstract object and a concrete object that instantiates it. Maybe clearer if we take the abstract object to be the color red. Something that is red can be alive, but as far as I know the color red is not alive; I don't even know what it would mean for it to be alive. Similarly life, which is an abstract object, is not alive in any sense I can think of. --Trovatore (talk) 20:38, 7 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

In short, the answer to the OP's question is probably "No", unless you consider the word life itself to be "alive" in the sense of "evolving". Thinking of the Beatle song "In My Life" - is that still just an abstract object? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:16, 8 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]