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President and Rector of Central European University, Budapest
(with which Sabancı University has had excellent relations
virtually from the outset); Non-Resident Permanent Fellow of the
Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin; a foremost professor of the
History of Science and the Philosophy of Science and Ideas. A
major critical thinker with enormous range and flexibility,
Yehuda Elkana might be expected to speak on virtually any topic
in the history of ideas relevant to rethinking aspects of modern
societies, globalization, pluralism, multiculturality,
democracy, citizenship, and human rights, as well as on : new
ideas in (higher) education; aspects of central and eastern
Europe after Communism; problems of conflict and peace-making in
the Middle East and elsewjhere in the contemporary world.
Further biographical details
Professor Dr. Yehuda Elkana was born in Yugoslavia in 1934, and
after the war and a year in a concentration camp he immigrated
to Israel in 1948. He studied physics, mathematics and history
of science, also taking courses in biology, and received an MSc
degree. In 1968, he completed his doctoral studies with a thesis
"On the Emergence of the Energy Concept," published later by
Harvard University Press. For one year, he taught at Harvard
University. From 1968 he taught in the Department of History and
Philosophy of Science at the Hebrew University and served as its
Chairman. He was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in
the Behavioral Sciences (1973-74) a Visiting Fellow at All Souls
College, Oxford (1977-78); from 1981 until 1991 he was Director
of the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science
and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. From 1968 to 1993 he was
Director of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. In 1988-89 he was
a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and since 1987 a
Permanent Fellow there. He is a Member of the Academic Advisory
Board of the Collegium Budapest, and its Deputy Chairman; Yehuda
Elkana is a corresponding member of the International Academy
for the History of Science. He is co-founder and editor of
Science in Context and author of several books and numerous
articles. From 1995 to 1999 he was full Professor for the
Philosophy of Science at the ETH Zurich. In April 1997 he became
a Member of the Scientific Board of the Collegium Helveticum. In
2001 he was elected to serve on the Board of Trustees of the
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for a period
of four years, i.e. till 2004. Since 1999 Yehuda Elkana is the
President and Rector of the Central European University in
Budapest. He is married to Dr. Yehudit Elkana and has four
children.
How Yehuda Elkana describes CEU as an educational project
Since 1999, I have been the President and Rector of Central
European University in Budapest. This is a graduate university,
with 800 master's and doctoral students in the Social Sciences
and Humanities. In addition to running an international
(students from 46 countries this year), English-language,
American-style graduate university, the intellectual challenge
is to establish a global niche there for creating new knowledge
in areas where rethinking is necessary and where rethinking is a
question of encouragement and intellectual risk-taking rather
than being a rich, ivy-league, elite place. This applies to a
research center on behavioral economics and other new ideas in
economics; in becoming a regional center in human rights; in
studying democratic forces in Islam; in researching the local
and the universal in the rule of law; in establishing a new
department in mathematics and its applications, emphasizing the
relevance for the social and biomedical sciences of the
mathematics of non-linear processes and complex systems; in
establishing a new department where social thinking is
integrating the non-Eurocentric research results from Sociology,
Anthropology, Comparative Religion, etc. All these follow from
my paper "Rethinking - not Unthinking - the Enlightenment" which
was a summary of years of work at Wissenschaftskolleg, delivered
at a Volkswagen symposium, and commented upon by Anthony Appiah.
Many of the concepts that underlie my planning and innovation
activity, like "the shifting boundary between the local and the
universal", the normative question of "what follows" for each
theoretical and seemingly purely abstract "Gedankengang", the
concept of "negotiated universals" to replace the dogmatic,
absolute, universal values and theories, and some other ideas,
were formulated during the deliberations of the three-year AGORA
project of the Wissenschafskolleg, of which I was one of the
three conveners.
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