Review of the Book ‘Ahmad Fardid: Alterity and Becoming’

IBNA (Iran Book News Agency) Religion and Thought Service: The 64th session of Iran’s Philosophy City, titled ‘Review and Criticism of the Book “Ahmad Fardid: Alterity and Becoming”,’ will be held on Thursday, November 11, 2025.

Speakers at this session include Amirhossein Ebrahim (author), Mohammad Ranjbar (writer, researcher, and manager of Pursesh Publishing), and Akbar Jabbari Daseinkav (writer and translator).

The mentioned session will take place from 4 PM to 6 PM, both in-person and online.

Iran’s Philosophy City is located in Tehran, Nelson Mandela Boulevard (Jordan), Goldan Alley, No. 5, 3rd floor.

Seyed Ahmad Fardid (1910-1994) is the most controversial intellectual figure in contemporary Iranian history. His famous statement, “The beginning of our history is the end of Western history,” is, in a sense, the first manifestation of contemporary Iranian intellectual self-awareness; even his opponents admit that with Fardid, we enter the realm of Iranian historical self-awareness.

If we want to raise a central question that the upcoming dissertation, on the whole, aims to answer, it is the issue of the synchronicity of Iranian thought with the ‘self’ and the ‘other’; that is, we have become complicated for ourselves due to the presence of a great ‘other’ named ‘the West,’ and this ‘other’ has become an irremovable problem for us, because we, at least in the sense considered in the current article, are experiencing ourselves for the first time to this extent embroiled in crisis, and even on the verge of a historical collapse and destruction.

Mohammad Ranjbar (born 1956 in Abadan) is a researcher and translator in the fields of philosophy and social sciences. He was a student of Ahmad Fardid and is the manager of Pursesh Publishing. In 1979, he went to Sweden to continue his studies but abandoned them halfway and returned to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War (Sacred Defense era).

The following works are among his translations: ‘Research Methods,’ Mohammad Ranjbar, Pursesh, 2005; ‘Life is Like This,’ Arthur Schopenhauer, translated by Mohammad Ranjbar, Publisher: Pursesh, 2007; ‘The Concept of Time,’ Martin Heidegger, translated by Mohammad Ranjbar and Nader Pournagshband, Publisher: Pursesh, 2021; ‘Man and Technology,’ Mohammad Ranjbar, Pursesh Publishing, 2023; ‘Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche,’ Walter Schubart, translated by Mohammad Ranjbar, Pursesh Publishing, 2023; ‘How Much Globalization Can Man Endure,’ Rüdiger Safranski, translated by Mohammad Ranjbar, Pursesh Publishing.