The Research Forum: French Economist Thomas Piketty Rejects Legion D'Honneur

Thursday 1 January 2015

French Economist Thomas Piketty Rejects Legion D'Honneur

French economist Thomas Piketty, the best-selling author of Capital in the 21st Century, has turned down France's top award, the Legion D'Honneur. (BBC, 1 January 2015)

"I have just learned that I was nominated for the Legion D'Honneur. I refuse this nomination because I do not think it is the government's role to decide who is honourable," Piketty told the news agency AFP. His book examines income inequality in society and became a surprise hit, topping the bestseller list in the US. Capital has been described by the prominent economist Paul Krugman as "the most important economics book of the year - and maybe of the decade".

Last year, cartoonist Jacques Tardi also turned down the Legion D'Honneur. Among those to have refused the award are philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and radiology pioneers Pierre and Marie Curie.

The question is what governments or international organisations such as the Nobel Prize Committee achieve by awarding ‘honours’ to prominent individuals: who is honouring who?! The Nobel Peace Prize was given to the US President Obama in 2009 as he took office, a man who would lead regime change in Libya and seek to overthrow Syria’s President Assad while continuing to support Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.

The European Union was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 in the midst of its financial / economic problems for its contribution to the advancement of peace in Europe in the past six decades. It is important to remember that the main EU powers were responsible for paving the way for the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and are currently siding with the US against Russia over the situation in Ukraine. This could lead to a third Cold War between Russia and the West if the demonisation of Russia continues.

Finally, among those honoured, there are those who use their award to recover lost prestige. James Watson, the world-famous biologist who was shunned by the scientific community after linking intelligence to race, said he is selling his Nobel Prize because he is short of money after being made a pariah. Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for uncovering the double helix structure of DNA, sparked an outcry in 2007 when he suggested that people of African descent were inherently less intelligent than white people.

He told the Financial Times he had become an “unperson” after he “was outed as believing in IQ” in 2007 and said he would like to use money from the sale to buy a David Hockney painting. (The Daily Telegraph, 24 November 2014). The Russia entrepreneur, Alisher Usmanov, paid $4.1m (£2.6m) for Watson’s medal at an auction at Christie’s in New York City in November and returned the medal to Watson.

Sartre letter delivered late to Nobel Foundation

A letter sent by renowned French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, asking not to be considered for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 was delivered too late to the Nobel Foundation, newly-released documents show.

According to the Swedish media on Saturday, the newly-released documents showed that Sartre’s letter was delivered to the Sweden-based academy on October 14, 1964, a month after he was appointed as the award’s top candidate.

The letter’s late delivery turned Sartre into the only figure in the history of the award, who willingly refused the world’s most prestigious literary award.

In the letter, Sartre had asked the academy to remove him from the list of Nobel candidates, saying he “always declined official honors” because they would curtail his freedom as an independent philosopher and thus would institutionalize him.

Sartre said in his letter that he would not accept the prize “either in 1964 or in the future.”

The historical documents regarding the letter’s late delivery were recently released after the end of the 50-year time span required before confidential documents can be publicized.

Sartre (1905-1980), considered by many as one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, is known throughout the world by his school of thought, Existentialism.

Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine that places man at the center of the world in the humanistic tradition. The philosophy stresses that each person is the product of his or her decisions and thus can never escape responsibility for his or her character, deeds and words, thus rejecting the naturalist notion that human beings are inescapably predetermined by their heredity and environment.

Press TV, Sat Jan 3, 2015 3:24PM

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About the Forum

The Forum initially started its work in December 1997 with the intention of promoting research culture and activities among doctoral candidates in one of the British universities in London. The Research Forum convened 8 sessions a year on humanities-related topics between 1997 and 2013.

The Forum now focuses on the production of self-taught courses, articles and commentary on some aspects of the news for students as well as the general public. The last meeting of the Forum took place in July 2015.

Mowlānā Jalāloddin Balkhi, known in Persia as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī and in the West simply as Rumi, was born on September 30, 1207 C. E. in Balkh Province, Afghanistan, then on the eastern edge of the Persian Empire. Rumi descended from a long line of Islamic jurists, theologians, and mystics, including his father, who was known by followers of Rumi as “Sultan of the Scholars.” When Rumi was still a young man, his father led their family more than 2,000 miles west to avoid the invasion of Genghis Khan’s armies. They settled in present-day Turkey, where Rumi lived and wrote most of his life.

As a teenager, Rumi was recognized as a great spirit by the poet and teacher Fariduddin Attar, who gave him a copy of his own Ilahinama (The Book of God). When his father died in 1231, Rumi became head of the madrasah, or spiritual learning community. The school reportedly had over ten thousand students, including masons, grocers, weavers, hatmakers, carpenters, tailors, and bookbinders.

Rumi’s oldest son, Sultan Velad, managed to save 147 of Rumi’s intimate letters, which provide insights about the poet and how he lived. Rumi often involved himself in the lives of his community members, solving disputes and facilitating loans between nobles and students. The letters are described as having lines of poetry scattered throughout.

In 1244, Rumi met Shams Tabriz, a dervish “God-man” who had taken a vow of poverty. Their meeting is considered a central event in Rumi’s life. Though accounts of their meeting differ, one story claims that Rumi was teaching by a fountain, and Shams walked up through the crowd of students and pushed Rumi’s books into the water, including his father’s spiritual diary. “You must now live what you have been reading about," Shams told Rumi. Rumi believed both his real life and his real poetry began when he met Shams. “What I had thought of before as God," Rumi said, “I met today in a human being.”

Shams and Rumi were close friends for about four years. Over the course of that time, Shams was repeatedly driven away by Rumi’s jealous disciples, including one of Rumi’s sons, Ala al-Din. In December of 1248, Shams again disappeared; it is believed that he was either driven away or killed. Rumi left the madrasah in search of his friend, travelling to Damascus and elsewhere. Eventually, Rumi made peace with his loss, returning to his home believing Shams to be a part of him: “His essence speaks through me.”

Rumi’s mourning for the loss of his friend led to the outpouring of more than 40,000 lyric verses, including odes, eulogies, quatrains, and other styles of Eastern-Islamic poetry. The resulting collection, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi or The Works of Shams Tabriz, is considered one of Rumi’s masterpieces and one of the greatest works of Persian literature.

In his introduction to his translation of Rumi’s The Shams, Coleman Barks has written: “Rumi is one of the great souls, and one of the great spiritual teachers. He shows us our glory. He wants us to be more alive, to wake up... He wants us to see our beauty, in the mirror and in each other.”

For the last twelve years of his life, beginning in 1262, Rumi dictated a single, six-volume poem to his scribe, Husam Chelebi. The resulting masterwork, the Masnavi-ye Ma’navi(Spiritual Verses), consists of sixty-four thousand lines, and is considered Rumi’s most personal work of spiritual teaching. Rumi described the Masnavi as “the roots of the roots of the roots of the (Islamic) Religion," and the text has come to be regarded by some Sufis as the Persian-language Koran.

In his introduction to an English edition of Spiritual Verses, translator Alan Williams wrote: “Rumi is both a poet and a mystic, but he is a teacher first, trying to communicate what he knows to his audience. Like all good teachers, he trusts that ultimately, when the means to go any further fail him and his voice falls silent, his students will have learnt to understand on their own.”

Rumi fell ill and died on December 17, 1273 C. E., in Konya, Turkey. His remains were interred adjacent to his father’s, and the Yeşil Türbe (Green Tomb) was erected above their final resting place. Now the Mevlâna museum, the site includes a mosque, dance hall, and dervish living quarters. Thousands of visitors, of all faiths, visit his tomb each month, honoring the poet of legendary spiritual understanding.

Source: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/jalal-al-din-rumi

Your Life Discourse!

It is soooo good when you realize that your life and every road you have taken made and makes sense... Even when you feel that the world will not applaud you for what you are doing, you find you have to do it yourself and clap your own hands. Later everything falls into place. In my doctoral thesis, I studied how the self-discourse is constructed along history. It is a fact that we describe our past like a coherent story. Even though we know that the discourse of our life is a construction, our life is actually built by roads and paths we accept, that come and go, and later make all sense because they are part of our own being. Once in a while we feel that our past is actually part of us.

Marcia Neme Buzalaf
marciabuzalaf@gmail.com.

Scholarship and Academia

Benedit Spinoza is one of the original thinkers among Western philosophers. When he was offered a Professorship of Philosophy at Heidelberg University at age of 31, he turned it down arguing that he wanted to be left alone to do his philosophising “in accordance with his own mind”. He proceeded to live a solitary life, earning his living by grinding and polishing lenses for spectacles, microscopes and telescopes – at the time a new profession.

Being a great philosopher and academic is a rare development: Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Mill or Nietzsche did not teach philosophy. The exceptions are Kant and Hegel.

Nothing much has changed since: academia is still not the right place for real scholars today. Mottos such as ‘publish or perish’ have mainly resulted in the production of shallow, regurgitated or ego-boosting publications. Universities are also no different from other corporate capitalist entities that seek to maximize their profit at the cost of quality service. They neither provide the scholar nor the student with a conducive environment for their development or self-fulfilment.

Thoughtful Sentences

Integrity: When the thoughts we think are the same as the words we speak, others will feel our integrity.

Enthusiasm: Those who are fired with an enthusiastic idea and who allow it to take hold and dominate their thoughts find that new worlds open for them. As long as enthusiasm holds out, so will new opportunities.

No Task Too Difficult: If you do everything with the feeling of happiness, there will be no task too difficult to perform.

A Long And Healthy Life: There are three ingredients for a long and healthy life: live with attention but without worry, use time in a worthwhile way, keep your thoughts pure, positive and filled with strength.

Thursday 1 January 2015

French Economist Thomas Piketty Rejects Legion D'Honneur

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