Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy (in Persian: انجمن شاهنشاهی فلسفه ایران) was founded in Iran during the Pahlavi era by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a Professor of History of Science and Philosophy at the University of Tehran who also served for several years as President of Aryamehr University of Technology in Iran. He was also the first president of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. The Academy was the first academic institution to be founded upon the principles of philosophical Traditionalism.
William Chittick, who is renowned scholar of Sufi thought, literature and Islamic philosophy, completed his PhD in Persian literature at Tehran University in 1974. He then taught comparative religion at the Humanities Department at Tehran's Aryamehr Technical University and left Iran just before the revolution in 1979. He was also for a short period before the revolution, an assistant professor at the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy.He has also served as assistant editor of Encyclopædia Iranica, and is currently professor of Religious Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Dr. Chittick has had collaborations with Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Allameh Tabatabaei on several important projects.
Famous quotes containing the words imperial, academy and/or philosophy:
“Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.”
—Apocrypha. Ecclesiasticus, 44:14.
The line “their name liveth for evermore” was chosen by Rudyard Kipling on behalf of the Imperial War Graves Commission as an epitaph to be used in Commonwealth War Cemeteries. Kipling had himself lost a son in the fighting.
“The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)
“If you look at history you’ll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)