The Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California (ICCNC) will hold its second quarterly debate program titled “Can God Speak?” on Sunday, September 11, 2022, at 11:00 AM PST (7:00 PM GMT). Philosophers Dr. Samual Fleischacker and Dr. Abdolkarim Soroush will participate in the debate. Dr. Yaser Mirdamadi will moderate the debate.
The purpose of these debates is to broaden and deepen the general public’s understanding of religion in the 21st century. The general theme of the first year of the debate series is Belief and Unbelief in a “Post-Secular Era.”
The debate will be on Zoom and live-streamed on ICCNC YouTube Channel.
Biographies
Samuel Fleischacker is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois Chicago. He studied at Yale University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1989. He works in moral and political philosophy, the history of moral and philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. Among the issues that have particularly interested him are the moral status of culture, the nature and history of liberalism, the relationship between moral philosophy and social science, and the relationship between moral and religious values. His publications include The Ethics of Culture (Cornell, 1994), A Third Concept of Liberty (Princeton, 1999), On Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion (Princeton, 2003), A Short History of Distributive Justice (Harvard, 2004), Divine Teaching and the Way of the World (Oxford, 2011), What Is Enlightenment? (Routledge, 2012), The Good and the Good Book (Oxford, 2015), and Being Me Being You: Adam Smith and Empathy (Chicago, 2019). Professor Fleischacker has been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the University Center for Human Values at Princeton, and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at Edinburgh University. He taught previously at Williams College.
Dr. Abdolkarim Soroush is one of the Muslim world's most influential thinkers for his analysis of the relationship between religious and secular knowledge and authority. He is a former member of the Academy of Philosophy, Tehran, Iran. As a multifaceted visionary scholar, innovative thinker, philosopher, religious reformer, poet, and translator, he has received much recognition from many acclaimed institutions of higher learning and a lot of attention from the world media. In 2004 he received the Erasmus Award in Amsterdam, and in 2005, he was named by Time Magazine as one of the world’s most influential people. In 2008 he was named by Prospect Magazine as one of the world’s most influential intellectuals. In 2009, based on a public poll, Foreign Policy Magazine ranked him number 45 of 100 world’s elite intellectuals and global thinkers. Dr. Soroush has also taught as a visiting professor at many prestigious universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and the Leiden-based International Institute. His diverse interests have led him to examine such topics as ethics and human sciences, intellectualism and pietism, the evolution of religious knowledge, the philosophical system of Rumi, and Persian Sufi poetry in his more than 30 books. Though most of Soroush’s books have been published in Persian and Turkish, he is the author of many essays in English on tolerance, pluralism, Islamic democracy, and comparative philosophy.
Dr. Yaser Mirdamadi is a researcher in medical ethics at the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London. In 2019, he received Ph.D. in Islamic and Middle East Studies from the University of Edinborough. He has a MA in Muslim Cultures from Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations (AKU-ISMC) London, UK, and a MA in Islamic Theology from Ferdowsi University Mashhad, Iran. Also, Dr. Mirdamadi completed a Level 3 Diploma (equivalent to a Master’s degree) in Classical Islamic studies from Hawza Ilmiyya (Islamic Seminary), Mashhad, Iran.
