UNESCO Courier articles from December 1994

UNESCO Courier archives from December 1994

Wolf Lepenies Talks to Francois Hartog
December 1, 1994... German sociologist Wolf Lepenies is the head of Berlin's Wissenschaftskolleg, a European institute open to researchers from all over the world. A member of many learned societies in the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Sweden and France,...

The Comfort of Certainty
December 1, 1994... In France the separation of church and state was designed to protect the Republic. In the United States its purpose was to preserve freedom of religion. Some years ago in Mozambique, a Portuguese settler who had decided to stay on after...

The Embrace of the Community
December 1, 1994... The idea of the sovereign individual regarded independently of his religion and his origins is a relatively recent development. It was preceded by the idea of a community towards which the individual has contradictory feelings. Let us get down to...

Faith and Reason
December 1, 1994... I understand a rationalist when he tells a Catholic bishop: Non serviam--I shall not serve. A secular rationalist is someone to whom I feel close. When I argue with him, I argue with a part of myself, with a fragment of my biography. I understand...

Roads to Revolution
December 1, 1994... In Iran the Shi'ite clergy rallied the discontented to trigger off the insurrection that brought down the Shah From the beginning of the sixteenth century--the time of the foundation of the Safavid dynasty during which Shi'ism became the state...

The Abdication of Thought
December 1, 1994... Fundamentalism and totalitarianism both reject dialogue. They also have two enemies: laughter, which is a foil to dogma of all kinds, and subjective experience, which sustains artists, rebels and poets When critical thinking is abandoned, giving...

Behind the Veil of Fundamentalism
December 1, 1994... For the moment the splits in Islamic societies are encouraging a return to the reassuring certainties of the fundamentalist message. How long will it last? It is impossible to appreciate the real danger of fundamentalism if it is reduced, as it...

India: The Threat to Union
December 1, 1994... For 45 years India has been facing religious movements which contest the foundations of the secular pluralist state created at the time of independence In India we use the word communalism to designate the political exploitation of religion,...

A New Hindu Identity
December 1, 1994... Psychoanalysis of a Hindu ideology In many parts of India today, especially the northern and central states, a new Hindu identity, Hindutva, is being constructed. It is the basis of an amorphous group of Hindu parties and groups, the Sangh...

Education, Key to the Future
December 1, 1994... RIO two years ago, Cairo yesterday, Copenhagen and Beijing next year--this extremely important series of United Nations conferences(*) reflects a growing awareness that the challenges facing our world are universal. These meetings are stages on...

The Splendor of Spis
December 1, 1994... A unique ensemble of medieval fortifications in Slovakia THE site is dramatic. Perched atop a rocky outcrop 634 metres above sea-level in the centre of Slovakia, Spis castle--Spissky Hrad--dominates a green carpet of rolling hills and valleys....

Hryhoriy Skovoroda
December 1, 1994... An Enlightenment philosopher of the Ukraine IN an old district of Kiev, the Podol, a monumental statue looks out over Peter Mogila Academy Square. It depicts a gently smiling man who looks for all the world as if he has just stopped for a chat...

The Sea's Dwindling Harvest
December 1, 1994... 'WE are risking another disaster," says Eduardo Loayaza, fisheries advisor with the World Bank's Agriculture and Natural Resources Department. "There are too many fishing boats chasing too few fish. It's like deforestation but it's invisible...

World Peace Begins at Home
December 1, 1994... Published below are extracts from a letter by the Chinese thinker Cai Yuanpei (Ts'ai Yuan-pei; 1863-1940) which first appeared in Correspondance, the journal of the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, in 1933. In the letter Cai...

Jose Carlos Mariategui (1894-1930): Witness to an Age
December 1, 1994... PERUVIANS called him--and still do--the Amauta, the Quechua language word for "master". In his lifetime, and after his untimely death at the age of thirty-five, he was regarded as a master not only in Peru but in many other parts of Latin America,...

History of Humanity, vol. 1, Prehistory and the Beginnings of Civilization.
December 1, 1994... A FRESH LOOK AT THE PAST IN 1946, UNESCO'S first Director-General, Julian Huxley, wrote that "The chief task before the humanities today would seem to be to help in constructing a history of the development of the human mind, notably in its...