Ramin Jahanbegloo, the Iranian philosopher who won notice in recent years for his courageous conferences that built bridges to the liberal West, who invited such major Western apostles of free speech as Jürgen Habermas to Tehran.

"Doing philosophy in a country like Iran,"

"as in many other countries, is a work of dissidence ... but philosophy for me since Socrates is a work of dissidence. It's not just because of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It teaches you, and you teach others, how to think otherwise. To question and to criticize."

one must "search for the humanity behind the inhuman," that a philosopher's most important task is to fight violence, intolerance, and inhumanity.

"You know, being on the side of violence is wrong: verbal violence, moral violence, military violence."

a Sorbonne-educated thinker, who has published more than 20 books and sees himself as a votary of Isaiah Berlin's liberalism as well as Gandhi's and the Dalai Lama's nonviolent activism.