Location: Abou Khater Auditorium / Main Campus, Zouk Mosbeh
Time: 9:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
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NDU will be holding a book-review panel of a book authored by Charles Malik, and a screening of a one-hour documentary about Charles Malik.
NDU published last year Charles Malik's earliest work of philosophy extracted in 1937 by Charles H. Malik from his doctoral dissertation at Harvard, but never before published. The book is an intricate study of the metaphysics of his philosophy professor, the renowned Alfred North Whitehead, with whom he shared a background in mathematics and physics. The book's title is “The Systems of Whitehead’s Metaphysics”, and it was probably the first colossal academic attempt to systemize Whitehead’s Thought.
The Panelists reviewing the book are established philosophers from five major universities in Lebanon: AUB, NDU, LAU, UOB, and USJ. The healthy diversity among the panelists is symbolically indicating, as Charles Malik was the founder of the first philosophy department in Lebanon and in the entire Arab world.
The documentary film is a biography of Charles H. Malik.
Charles H. Malik (1906-1987) was both an influential philosopher from Lebanon and a celebrated diplomat on the world stage. He is one of the shapers of the twentieth century through his substantive contributions to the framing of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Among his many publications are Christ and Crisis (1962), Man in the Struggle for Peace (1963), The Wonder of Being (1974), A Christian Critique of the University (1980), and a twenty-thousand word essay on diplomacy published in 1973 in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
He was decorated with over fifty honorary doctoral degrees from West European and North American Universities.