Unesco’s Secretary General Irina Bokova has announced that World Philosophy Day, held under the aegis of Unesco, will no longer be held in Tehran where the 2010 event had originally been scheduled. This year, philosophy’s world capital will be Paris and Unesco has withdrawn all acknowledgement of Tehran’s event. It has been cancelled. The protest by Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations, which had opened the debate at the very beginning of the year with a letter signed by Giuliano Amato, Giancarlo Bosetti and Ramin Jahanbegloo, has therefore achieved its objective in spite of many long months of hesitations and postponements.

The fact that Ahmedinejad’s Iran did not guarantee decent conditions for a free dialogue between philosophers was clear from the very beginning. This became all the more obvious when it was announced that the person organising events in Iran, Gholamreza Avani, the director of the Iranian Institute of Philosophy, had been replaced with Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s son-in-law, while at the same time authorities issued directives stating that western social sciences and philosophy were not suited to Iran.

The delay in assuming a clear decision on cancelling the Unesco-sponsored event in Iran increased embarrassment that became unsustainable when news on the state of affairs was made public by Reset-Doc in a meeting held in New York at the New School of Social Research on September 27th and support for the protest was announced by many famous philosophers such as Seyla Benhabib, Juergen Habermas, Michael Walzer, Axel Honneth, Alessandro Ferrara, Andrew Arato, Jean Cohen, and Iranian intellectuals such as Hamid Dabashi, Farzin Vardat and Ferzaneh Ganji. The website www.resetdoc.org opened its pages to a flow of protests and in the meantime preparations were underway on-line to host an alternative World Philosophy Day with www.philosophy4freedom.org. The event in New York, reported by the American and German press, made public the absurdity of an event that was now imminent. Bokova’s decision has at last saved Unesco from embarrassment and made even clearer Tehran’s isolation.

Iran had some time ago set up a website using Unesco’s logo to celebrate and document World Philosophy Day in Iran: www.philosophyday.ir. The Unesco logo was immediately removed from the website’s homepage, while for the moment there are still traces of it on internal pages. It is not known whether there will be official reactions from Iran.