Ramin Jahanbegloo
Ramin Jahanbegloo (Persian: رامین جهانبگلو, born 28 December 1956[1] in Tehran) is an Iranian philosopher and academic based in Toronto, Canada.
Biography[edit]
Ramin Jahanbegloo was born in Tehran, Iran. He has a doctorate in philosophy from Sorbonne University in Paris, France, where he lived for twenty years.[2] He was a post-doctorate fellow in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. He is married to Azin Moalej and has a daughter named Afarin Jahanbegloo.
Academic and intellectual career[edit]
Jahanbegloo's intellectual activity focuses on fostering constructive dialogue between divergent cultures. He has written numerous books and articles in Persian, English, and French on the subject of Western philosophy and modernity. In 1991 he published his book Conversations with Isaiah Berlin in French, which was translated into English and published the following year. The book records a series of interviews with the famous philosopher Isaiah Berlin, which cover intellectual questions ranging from the moral philosophy of Tolstoy to the meaning of liberalism. Between 1997 and 2001, he was an adjunct professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto in Canada.
In 2001, he served at the National Endowment for Democracy as a fellow at the federally funded program known as the Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellows Program[3]
Upon returning to Tehran, he was appointed head of the Contemporary Philosophy Department of the Cultural Research Center. In his efforts to promote dialogue, he has interviewed scholars and intellectuals from all over the world, among them George Steiner, Noam Chomsky, Ashis Nandy and the Dalai Lama. In recent years, he invited Richard Rorty, Timothy Garton Ash, Antonio Negri, and Michael Ignatieff and other Western intellectuals to Iran.[4]
Career after imprisonment[edit]
In 2006 and 2007 he was Professor of Democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, India.[24] In January 2008 he returned to the University of Toronto as a professor of Political Science, Massey College Scholar-at-Risk, and Research Fellow at the Centre for Ethics at Trinity College. In 2009, he wrote a book, Talking Architecture: Raj Rewal In Conversation With Ramin Jahanbegloo. The book was inaugurated on 19 December 2009 in New Delhi, India. He also taught a series of nine online Persian-language lectures on nonviolence and nonviolent resistance for Tavaana: E-Learning Institute for Iranian Civil Society.[25] He currently works in O.P Jindal Global University, India as a Vice Dean and the head of the Center for Mahatma Gandhi Studies.
Inspired by Czechoslovakia's renowned Charter 77,[26] Ramin Jahanbegloo along with a group of Iranian intellectuals (Mehrdad Loghmani,[27] Ali Ehsasi,[28] Mehrdad Ariannejad,[29] Mehrdad Hariri[30]) penned Charter91,[31] منشور ۹۱,[32] a document that aimed to unite the Iranian people around a common human rights and civic agenda.