Who is Ivan Illich?
Ivan Illich was born in Vienna (Austria) on September 4, 1926 in the bosom of a family of rural landowners. He studied in the Escoles Pies in the Austrian capital (1936-1941) from which he was expelled by the application of anti-Semitic laws (his father, a Catholic Croatian, was married to a Sephardic woman). He finished his secondary studies in Florence (Liceo Scientifico Leonardo da Vinci, 1942). He studied natural science (majoring in organic chemistry and crystallography) at the University of Florence (1945-1947), while receiving a degree in philosophy (1944-1947) and, later, in theology (1947-1951) from the Gregorian University of Rome. He received his doctorate in History from the Philosophy School of the University of Salzburg (1951) with a doctoral thesis called ‘The Philosophical and Methodological Dependence of Arnold Toynbee’, which earned him the distinction summa cum laude. Illich had been chosen by the Vatican for a diplomatic career, but he preferred to become a priest,
For over 35 years he has been an influential social critic who has questioned the assumptions of our daily lives. The UTNE Reader named him as the most important social philosopher of the 20th century. One of his main methods is to identify concepts that we almost universally accept and show how they work to actually become the sources of our failures. His works are also closely related to the field of communication, in that they deal extensively with symbols in politics, language use and social perspective, the dangers of linguistic formalism, and communication and gender. Ivan Illich provides in-depth and scathing criticisms of most of the major institutions and values that comprise our civilization. This is a seminar. We read his work and talk about it, how it relates to us and our civilization. Ask if you would like to see the syllabus. I plan on having 6-12 students. Erich Fromm, in his introduction to Celebration of Awareness (Illich 1973: 11) describes Ivan Illich as follows: Th
