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.
“I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike—and I don’t think there really is a distinction between the two—are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.”
—Harold Bloom (b. 1930)
“Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own,—because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)