Berkeley Lectures Series presens
A Lecture by
Darioush Ashouri
Topic:
The Open Language
Date: Oct 6, 2013
Place: Berkeley CA
Darioush Ashouri studied at the Faculty of Law, Political Sciences and Economics of the University of Tehran, and has been visiting professor of Persian language and literature at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Ashoori taught at the Oriental Institute of the University of Oxford, and lectured on political philosophy and political sociology at the University of Tehran. From 1970 to 1978 Ashoori was a member of the second Academy of Persian Language.
Ashoori has worked extensively as an author, essayist, translator, literary interpreter, encyclopedist, and lexicologist. His intellectual interests cover a wide interdisciplinary range, including political sciences, literature, philosophy and linguistics. His main domain of intellectual focus is the cultural and linguistic matters of his native country, Iran, as a Third World country encountering modernity.
He has made vast contributions to the development of the Persian vocabulary and terminology in the domains of human sciences and philosophy by coining new words and modifying existing ones. His works in this domain are compiled in his Farhang-e ‘olum-e ensāni (A Dictionary of Human Sciences). Among his major works stands a hermeneutical, intertextual study of the Divan of Hafez (Erfān o rendi dar she’r-e Hafez) which introduces a new approach to the understanding of the great classical poet. As translator, he has translated numerous classical literary and philosophical works by Nietzsche, Machiavelli, Shakespeare and others into Persian.