Mehmet T. Ayar · Private instruction · Mill Valley, San Francisco & online
I teach Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and the literature written in them, one-on-one, for people who want to read the originals. I also run private sessions in experimental philosophy for people building AI who want to think harder about knowledge, judgment, and mind.
این جهان کوه است و فعل ما ندا
سوی ما آید نداها را صدا
This world is a mountain, and what we do is a call; the echo of our calls comes back to us.
Rumi, Masnavi, Book I · the couplet we read on day one
Offer one
From the alphabet to reading Hafez, Rumi and Sa'di in Persian; classical Arabic prose and poetry; Ottoman documents and manuscripts; Sufi and philosophical works in the original. The goal is always the same: you open the text and it speaks.
Offer two
علم هو الظن لا يتغير
Knowledge is the conjecture that does not change.
Ibn al-Haytham, 11th century
Private sessions for founders, engineers, and researchers who work near language models, agents, or robotics and want to think seriously about the questions underneath the engineering.
Experimental philosophy, x-phi, means we don't just argue about intuitions, we test them. Sessions combine close reading of a few key texts, thought experiments, and small designed experiments you can run on your own models or with your own team. I also bring a tradition most people in AI have never encountered: Islamic and Sufi philosophy of knowledge and perception, which spent a thousand years on the question of what it is to know, long before there were machines to ask it about.
This is not coaching, therapy, or a lecture. It is serious private intellectual work.
How a session works
Jivat, civat in Kurdish spelling, is the word for the gathering: people sitting together around a table, or a text. A session here is exactly that, at its smallest: two people and one difficult thing.
Before
A free 20-minute call. You tell me what you want to be able to read, or what question is bothering you. I tell you honestly whether I'm the right person.
During
We read closely and slowly. Language sessions build toward a real text from the first hour. Philosophy sessions test the intuition rather than admire it.
After
You leave with something you can use: a passage you can now read, an argument you can now make, or an experiment you can now run.
A short reading
این جهان کوه است و فعل ما ندا
īn jahān kūh ast o fe'l-e mā nedā · sū-ye mā āyad nedā-hā rā sedā
A first-year reader learns four words: kūh, mountain; fe'l, deed; nedā, a call; sedā, a sound. A close reader notices that Rumi has used two different words for what is, physically, the same noise. What leaves us is nedā: a call, a summons, something with intent in it. What comes back is sedā: mere sound, stripped of the intention that sent it. The mountain does not answer; it returns. The whole moral weight of the couplet sits in that shift of vocabulary, and no translation that renders both words as “echo” can carry it.
That distinction, between a voice and a return, between something that means and something that merely sounds like meaning, is the question I ask in the philosophy sessions, about people and about machines.
About
I am a language teacher, literary translator, experimental philosopher (x-phi), and technosopher based in Mill Valley, California. I have taught Arabic, Persian, and Turkish privately for many years, and my other work has been long-form: literary translation, research in Islamic intellectual history and Sufi philosophy, and large-scale projects on classical texts that take years rather than weeks.
My interest in AI is not a pivot. It comes from the same place as the texts: the question of what knowing is, how a mind, or something that behaves like one, can be said to have it, and how much of what we call judgment is actually intuition we have never examined. Experimental philosophy gives that question a method. The classical tradition gives it a memory.
العبد مجبورٌ في اختياره
The servant is compelled in his choosing.
Ibn Arabi, 13th century
I work with a small number of people at a time, and I say no when I'm not the right fit.
Contact
Write me a few lines: which kind of work you're interested in, what you want to be able to read or to think through, and whether you're in Marin, in the city, or elsewhere. I reply within a day.
Sessions are paid per session or in four-session blocks. The intro call is free; there are no free first lessons.