Peace Talk — Autumn 2005
The Quarterly Newsletter of Peace Action MaineHiroshima is the site of the next, seventh, world Congress of the International Society for Universal Dialogue. The date is the first week-end in June, 2007. Having been elected president of this worldwide organization in Helsinki this past July at the Society’s sixth world Congress, I am bending my efforts to turn this 16-year old organization’s full attention to the theme of “Given the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what questions must philosophy ask and try to answer as a challenge to itself, to the governments of the world powers, and to the human species as a whole?” I am hopeful that something on that order will animate most of the papers and keynote speakers in Hiroshima in 2007.
ISUD began its life in Warsaw on the same weekend that the Berlin Wall came down, in the fall of 1989. This is a symbol of what we are trying to accomplish. We want to advance the meaning and practice of cross cultural dialogue throughout the world, to break down walls of exclusion, selfisolation, bias, suspicion and hatred between all cultures and at the same time to affirm each culture’s sense of pride and belief in its own spirit of creativity and life-promoting ways. We believe that this is a fundamental way to inward and outward peace.
Among our 250 members there are philosophers from Japan, China, India, Indonesia, Africa, and Latin America as well as from the United States, Canada, and Europe. We need and want to have participation from Muslim countries in addition to Indonesia. One of the goals I identified in my acceptance speech in Helsinki is to increase our membership from countries other than Europe, the United States and Canada. By doing so, we will also reduce the inevitable eurocentrism that to some degree continues to flavor our papers, panels, and meetings. I say “inevitable” because we were founded by philosophers who grew up and rather naturally imbibed a western, euro-dominated tradition of philosophy and science — though the papers in Helsinki clearly revealed that this is changing.
The theme of the Helsinki Congress this past July was “Humanity at the Turning Point: Re-thinking Nature, Culture, and Freedom.” Eighty-two people presented papers; there were keynote speakers from China, Germany, and the United States. Janusz Kuczynski, head of the philosophy department at Warsaw University, was presented with an ISUD award for distinguished contribution to universal dialogue. We will continue to present such an award at each of our world congresses to philosophers who demonstrate their commitment to universal dialogue. We members of ISUD believe that real dialogue is a major key to outward and inward peace. We believe that dialogue has not been fully tried throughout human history. Philosophy has a supreme responsibility and opportunity to make a profound contribution to the meaning and practice of dialogue. Information about ISUD is available on the web at www.isud.org