Mehdi Haeri Yazdi

Mehdi Yazdi Hairi (* 1923 in Qom, † 8 July 1999, Tehran, Persian مهدی حائری یزدی ) was an Iranian religious scholar and a philosopher representative of modern Islamic philosophy. Mehid Hairi Yazdi was the son of Abdulkarim Haeri Yazdi, the founder of the Islamic schools of Qom.

Biography

Yazdi studied and taught until 1979 in the United States and Canada, including as a student of William K. Frankena. Thus he acquired a thorough knowledge of recent European and American philosophers, including David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Bertrand Russell, George Edward Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein and William James. This allowed him a systematic study of Islamic authors such as Avicenna, Mulla Sadra and Suhrawardi, through which he systematically reconstructed their ideas and in some cases further developed. 1979 Yazdi went back to Iran. Yazdi thought hard about traditions illuminationistischer theorists. Especially in his monograph on the principles of Islamic epistemology he develops them, brings them into contact with contemporary questions of analytical self-consciousness and cognition theories and attempts to develop a stand-alone alternative.

Yazdi was a member of the International Council of Ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Bioethics at Georgetown University, one of several stations, where he pursued his interest in intercultural issues in institutional and political framework. Ever Yazdi was politically very active; he was in contact with many Iranian ayatollahs and sought to develop a modern Shiite political theory.

Works

• The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy, State University of New York Press, Albany 1992
• Hekmat va Hokumat. Shadi Publishing 1995.
• Islam and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the yearbook of the Shiite school of thought, 4, 1341, 67-76.
• Patterns of Clerical Political Behavior in Postwar Iran, 1941-53, Middle Eastern Studies 26/3 (1990).