Reza Davari Ardakani was born in Ardakan, in central Iran, in 1933. He belongs to a generation of Iranian philosophers specialists of Ahmad Fardid and Martin Heidegger. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran, and president of the Iranian Academy of Sciences from 1998 to 2023, 

From Ardakan to Tehran

Davari’s intellectual formation was unusually broad. After completing his early education, he worked as a schoolteacher before entering the University of Tehran in the 1950s. He studied philosophy there and eventually completed his doctorate in 1967. His dissertation examined the practical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and its influence on the political philosophy of Al-Farabi.

This early interest in Greek philosophy and Farabi would remain important throughout his career. Davari never regarded Islamic philosophy as a museum of historical doctrines. Rather, he became interested in the question of how philosophical thinking emerges within a civilization and how it responds to the historical conditions of that civilization.

His later work would therefore move constantly between Plato, Aristotle, Farabi, Nietzsche, Heidegger and the intellectual problems of contemporary Iran.

He also encountered the Iranian intellectual tradition surrounding Ahmad Fardid, one of the earliest and most influential interpreters of Heidegger in Iran. Fardid’s importance was not simply that he introduced a German philosopher to Iranian readers. He attempted to use Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics to interpret Iran’s own encounter with modernity.

Davari inherited this problem and transformed it into a much more systematic philosophical project.

Heidegger and the question of the West

The central concept in Davari’s thought is the West.

But when Davari speaks of “the West,” he does not merely mean Europe or North America. His use of the term is philosophical and historical. The West represents a particular form of civilization, one whose development culminates in modern science, technology, rationalism, humanism and the increasing domination of the world by the human subject.

This interpretation owes much to Heidegger.

For Heidegger, modernity was not simply a period characterized by industrialization or political liberalism. It represented a stage in the history of Western metaphysics in which beings increasingly appear as objects available for calculation, representation and control.

Davari brings this diagnosis into the Iranian context.

His question is therefore not whether Iran should accept or reject a particular Western political model. It is whether the philosophical assumptions underlying modern civilization can simply be transplanted into a society whose historical experience is fundamentally different.

This distinction is essential to understanding Davari. His critique of the West is not primarily a geopolitical critique. It is a critique of a particular conception of humanity.

The modern individual imagines himself to be autonomous, rational and capable........

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