The Challenges of Ivan Illich: A Collective Reflection

Contributors

243 C o n t r i b u t o r s Gesine Bottomley studied political science and philosophy, as well as library and information sciences. She lived in Canada for sixteen years and was employed in libraries in Toronto and London, Ontario, and in Fredericton, New Brunswick. She returned to Germany and built up the library of the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study) in Berlin, beginning in 1981, where she continues today. She taught the course “Research Methods in Libraries” at the Philipps University in Marburg during the winter semester 1985–1986, while Ivan Illich was a guest professor there. In 1992–1993, she taught a similar course at the University of Bremen, again in conjunction with Illich’s lectures. Marion Boyars (1928–1999) entered the publishing field in 1960 when she joined John Calder to create Calder and Boyars Publishers. For more than fifteen years, this firm published the works of such avant-garde writers as Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs , Henry Miller, Peter Weiss, Hubert Selby Jr., Georges Bataille, Raymond Radiguet , Witold Gombrowicz, and Julio Cortázar. She was among the first to publish eventual Nobel Prize winners Heinrich Böll, Elias Canetti, Eugenio Montale, and Kenzaburo Oe; she also published the writings of modern composers and works of social criticism. In 1975, her collection of authors was transferred to the new firm of Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd., which continues her special tradition of selective publishing and keeps in print the most complete backlist of Ivan Illich books available in English. Eugene J. Burkart met Ivan Illich in 1973 while attending language school in Cuernavaca . When he returned to the United States, he became a lawyer and settled in Waltham, Massachusetts, with the idea of working for the have-nots in our society. In the meantime, reading the writings of Illich, Burkart came to doubt conventional certainties about economic justice. He writes, “I eventually concluded that the best way to understand Illich’s work is as a detailed study of the myriad and varied barriers to friendship that exist in modern life.” Barbara Duden, professor of sociology at the University of Hannover, Germany, writes that she has “been challenged by Ivan Illich’s critique of institutionalization, professionalization, and the promises of progress.” Through Illich’s perspective, she sees modernity as singularly “Janus-faced when one turns to women.” Moreover, as a result of her studies of women’s somatic experience in the early eighteenth century, she has learned “from women long dead, the older meaning of biology [as] the narration of one’s curriculum vitae.” In her writing and teaching, she describes herself as “keeping away from feminist constructivism or postmodernism, taking a stand with nonacademic, nonprofessional women’s ways of knowing.” Jean-Pierre Dupuy, born in 1941, is professor of social and political philosophy at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. In 1982, he founded the Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée (CREA), the philosophical research group of the Ecole Polytechnique , and serves as its director. He is also a professor (one-third time) at Stanford University. His current research program focuses on the paradoxes of rationality, or the classical philosophical problem of the antinomies of reason in the age of rational choice theory, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science. Aaron Falbel first encountered the books and ideas of the education critic John Holt in 1984, and it was through Holt that he says he was led to Ivan Illich, “whose critique went beyond schooling and even beyond education.” For Falbel, Illich offered “a critique of society, of the certainties and axioms, the mental topology that made such a society possible.” According to Falbel, around 1990 he “made the decision to become a war tax resister. This meant to live a life of voluntary austerity (relatively speaking) to avoid having to pay federal taxes that would be used to murder people in Iraq (among other places).” He has maintained his connection with Holt’s ideas of “unschooling” through his wife, Susannah Sheffer, former editor of the magazine Growing Without Schooling, which was founded by Holt in 1977. Domenico Farias was born in 1927 in Reggio Calabria, Italy. He has studied problems of philosophy, politics, and law characteristic of highly developed scientific and technical societies. His recent research has focused on current creationist theories of natural law, on a search for their origins in Philo of Alexandria, and on an evaluation of their importance in relation to present-day discussions about the principles of law. Presently, he...