“Swiss Lectures – Texts on international law and world order”

“My philosophical-hermeneutic point of view is this: I can only understand myself completely if I am capable of establishing a relation to other identities. That is true for the individual as well as for the collective. […] If you realize that the knowledge about other cultures is a prerequisite for the possibility to get to know yourself, we will have a completely different basis for what we call peaceful coexistence, i.e. a peaceful living together of cultures and countries.” (p.27)

“May the reading inspire us to deepen and make further fruitful the idea of mutually respecting cultures and people, the awareness of the productivity of exchange and diversity instead of violent power politics and the ‘necessity of understanding beyond ideological borders’ ”(p. 75).
(Foreword by the editors, p. 10)

About the author

Professor Dr phil. Dr h.c. Dr h.c. Hans Köchler (*1948) served as Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) from 1990 until 2008. He is President of the International Progress Organization, which he co-founded in 1972. Since then Hans Köchler has been issuing numerous publications, undertaking journeys, delivering speeches and making contributions to various international organisations; this way he has been committed to the dialogue of cultures. He works in various committees and expert bodies dealing with issues of international democracy, human rights and development. Hans Köchler is a member of the University Council of the Berlin University for Digital Sciences (Berlin). Since 2018 he has been teaching at the Center for Cultural Diplomacy Studies in Berlin. Hans Köchler lives in Vienna.