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In his Notebooks (1914-1916), Wittgenstein announces that ‘artwork is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis’. At nearly the same time, in another part of the world, there was a critic and thinker, who thought art as making objects ‘unfamiliar’. He was Victor Shklovsky. I argue that there is a noticeable and yet unintended similarity and relation between these two aesthetic viewpoints. Wittgenstein and Shklovsky’s emphasis on art is its power to pave the way for the readers (in the extended sense of meaning) to feel things in themselves and ‘out of their normal context’. As Shklovsky claims ‘art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways’; in contrast, through ordinary way of seeing, objects are ‘reckoned as nothing’. According to Wittgenstein and similar to Shklovsky’s attitude ‘aesthetically the miracle is that the world exists. That what exists does exist’. In this paper I attempt to show that the early Wittgenstein’s ideas of aesthetics are in harmony with the Shklovsky’s formalistic theory of art. In this direction, I focus on Wittgenstein’s sub specie aeternitatis’ and Shklovsky’s defamiliarization; because I think that they fill each other’s gaps. An artist defamiliarizes objects and the spectators see the objects sub specie aeternitatis. In Shklovsky’s thinking Habitualization (which ‘devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war’) is very near to what Wittgenstein means by ‘the usual way of looking at things’.

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One philosophical theme often attributed to Khayyámic rubáis is nihilism, which unfortunately has not been examined in detail and according to a firm theoretical basis. This paper probes into the theme in two famous Persian collections of such rubáis: Sadeq Hedayat’s edition of Taraneh-haye Khayyám as well as Forughi and Ghani’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. For this purpose, the paper consists of an introduction as well as two main parts and a conclusion. In the introduction, the necessity of holding the theory of Khayyámic rubáis —that is, a school of rubái-composing after Omar Khayyam and not the Rubáiyát of Khayyam— is explained. In the first part of the paper, which is entirely theoretical, based on Donald Crosby’s classification of nihilisms in his book, The Specter of the Absurd, two relating types of nihilism along with some common arguments for nihilism are mentioned. In the second practical part, the aforementioned definitions and assumptions are applied to the rubáis under discussion. At the end comes the conclusion.