In the Mirror of the Past
Lectures and Addresses 1978-1990
Ivan Illich [+–]
Ivan Illich was born in Vienna to a Croatian father and Sephardic-Jewish mother, and had as native languages Italian, French and German. He later learnt Serbo-Croatian, the language of his grand-fathers, then Ancient Greek and Latin, as well as Spanish, Portuguese and Hindi. Thereafter, he studied histology and crystallography at the University of Florence (Italy), theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in the Vatican (1942-1946) and medieval history in Salzburg. He is the author of Tools for Conviviality, The Right to Useful Unemployment, Energy and Equity, Limits to Medicine, Shadow Work, Gender, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, Deschooling Society and In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978-1990. Illich lived much of his life in Mexico and the United States, he died in 2002.
During the 1980s Ivan Illich added another dimension to his thought through the study of Medieval history. In the current volume he aims to demonstrate the extent to which the groundwork for the institutions that characterize our world today was laid in the twelfth century. The topics with which Illich engages center on health, housing, schooling, literacy, technology, peace and ethical values, his overiding concern being individual freedom realized in personal ‘inter-dependence’.
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART ONE
Opening address on the occasion of the first meeting of the Asian Peace Research Association, Yokohama, 1 December 1980
Address to ‘People’s Forum: Hope,’ 23 April 1982
Read and distributed at the 20th Evangelischer Kirchentag, Hanover, 9 June 1983
Address to the annual Human Economy Session at the Eastern Economics Association Conference, Boston, 1 March 1988
Silence is a Commons [+–]
Opening remarks at the Asahi Symposium: Science and Man – the Computer-Managed Society, Tokyo, 21 March 1982
Dwelling [+–]
Address to the Royal Institution of British Architects, York, July 1984
Inaugural speech, Sevagram Ashram Pratishthan, Sevagram, Wardha, January 1978
Disvalue [+–]
Lecture tot eh first public meeting of the Entropy Society, Tokyo, Keyo University, 9 November 1986
Keynote speech at the 16th General Assembly of the Society for International Development, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 15 August 1979
PART TWO
Fragment from notes for a lecture at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, New York, Spring 1979
Opening speech at the plenum of the 5th World Congress of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies, Sorbonne, Paris, July 1984
Taught Mother Tongue [+–]
Prepared for a meeting on ‘The Need for New Terminology to Deal with “Mother Tongues,”‘ held at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India 1978
PART THREE
Lecture to the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, May 1984
Special guest lecture at the American Education Research Association general Assembly, San Francisco, August 1986
The Object of Objects: An Elegy for the Anchored Text, concluding statement at an international conference on The Socio-semiotics of Objects: The Role of Artifacts in Social Symbolic Processes, University of Toronto, 24 June 1990
Lecture given at the Second National Science, Technology and Society Conference on Technological Literacy, organised by Science through Science, Technology and Society, project of the Pennsylvania State University, Washington, DC, February 1987
PART FOUR
Consultation on Health and Healing in America, Pennsylvania State University, January 1985
Presented at a planning event of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Chicago, 29 March 1990
Drafted with Dr Robert Mendelsohn for discussion at the School of Medicine, University of Illinois, Chicago, 20 November 1987
