- Published on 05 February 2010
- Written by WPF Dialogue of Civilizations
Dr. Dariush Shayegan Iranian philosopher Dr. Dariush Shayegan was – as the first person ever – awarded the Global Dialogue Prize, an international humanities award. The Award Ceremony was held in ?rhus Concert Hall, ?rhus (Denmark) on January 27, 2010.
The Prize, based in Denmark’s second largest city of Aarhus, is awarded to persons excelling in research and knowledge presentation within the field of intercultural dialogue and the promotion of peaceful co-existence. The nomination and selection of candidates for the award has been conducted by a group of internationally renowned researchers. Sponsoring the award are Grundfos, the Municipality of Aarhus, Central Denmark Region, VisitAarhus and Aarhus University.
The Global Dialogue Prize has been realised through a donation of DKK 500,000 (approx. 100,000 USD) from The Poul Due Jensen Foundation.
Dariush Shayegan has been awarded the prize for his extensive academic body of work which is widely respected and has been translated into several languages. As early as 1977, he organised an international conference on multicultural societies, and his concept of civilisational dialogue has gained many followers in the academic society. He writes with a unique scholarly breadth about the cultural history of Muslim countries as well as of India, Europe, China, Japan and Latin America. He is especially well known by fellow thinkers for his analyses of the cultural situation in contemporary Muslim societies.
‘I am thrilled and honoured to accept the Global Dialogue Prize. What we were looking for in the nineteen seventies as a way out from our cultural dilemmas has now taken, by virtue of globalization and the electronic revolution, new forms of challenge. I see this award as a sign that our search goes on even today, and that both the East and the West are involved in our quest for solutions’, said Dr. Dariush Shayegan.
‘Aarhus University has signed a declaration which decrees that it the university is a trustee of the European humanist tradition; its constant care is to attain universal knowledge; to fulfil its vocation it transcends geographical and political frontiers and affirms the vital need for different cultures to know and influence each other. The Global Dialogue Prize is in accordance with this ambition and so Aarhus University supports the award. I wish to congratulate Dr. Dariush Shayegan on receiving the inaugural award’, said Rector of Aarhus University, Lauritz B. Holm-Nielsen.
‘The first awarding of the Global Dialogue Prize is in line with these acts of public recognition and acknowledges the laureate’s outstanding contribution to the philosophy of culture. Dariush Shayegan’s initial question, raised at the Tehran conference in 1977, as to the “conditions of the possibility” of dialogue has led him to a genuine intercultural exploration of the cultural mind. While his “empirical” point of departure was an analysis of his nation’s – and civilization’s – encounter with the “West,” and the worldview of modernity represented by the latter, he has proven capable of drawing the consequences for the individual and the collective psyche in different cultural environments, reaching out to cultures and civilizations that have experienced a similar fate’, said Professor Hans K?chler Member of the Award Committee in his Laudatio on the occasion of the awarding of the Global Dialogue Prize to Dariush Shayegan.
’I am thrilled that we this year – for the first time ever – can award The Global Dialogue Prize here in Aarhus’, said Mayor of the Municipality of Aarhus, Nicolai Wammen.
Read more about Dr. Dariush Shayegan on http://www.globaldialogueprize.org




An Article by George Monbiot, British writer and political activist, published at "The Guardian" on April 30, 2012
A one-sided justice sees weaker ...
An article by Tiberio Graziani, President of IsAG – Institute for Advanced Studies in Geopolitics and Auxiliary Sciences, director of Geopolitica, J...
An Article by Javier Solana, President of the ESADE Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics, for El País, published at "The Guardian" on March 29...
An Arcticle by Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, published at Outlookindia.com on May ...
An Interview with Joseph Stiglitz, professor at Columbia University and a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, published at U...
A Note by Kamran Mofid, Founder of the NGO "Globalisation for the Common Good Initiative", published at his Blog on May 7, 2012
Voters in France an...
Opening address by Founding President of the World Public Forum "Dialogue of Civilizations" Vladimir Yakunin at the opening of the Plenary Meeting o...
The second part of Interview with Walter Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor and Director, Center for Global studies and the Humanities, Duke U...
A Note by Kamran Mofid, Founder, Globalization for the Common Good Initiative, Member of the International Coordinating Committee of the WPF Dialogu... 
















































