The 2008 Big Ideas Forum on the Enlightenment Somali-born writer, activist and feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali is best known for her explosive 2007 memoir, Infidel, which recounts a repressed and brutal childhood in a Muslim family, including being genitally mutilated by her devout grandmother. Having publicly lambasted both Islam and the prophet Mohammed, she has been the target of numerous death threats, and when she spoke recently at the Sydney Opera House, security was so tight that her presence at the event could only be announced that same morning.
Dr Arthur Herman is an historian and author, most recently of Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, and most famously of How the Scots Invented the Modern World. He has recently come to notoriety with a series of public statements and op-ed pieces arguing that climate change is a myth propagated by zealots, and will be proven by history to be as ideologically driven as eugenics was in the first half of the 20th Century.
Professor Frank Furedi is a sociologist, who founded the Revolutionary Communist party in Britain in 1970 (it was disbanded in 1997). He has written extensively on the sociology of risk, and more recently has turned his attention to an idea that we’re living in a fear-soaked, overly cautious society, in which the state is over-regulating emotions such as fear and happiness.
What do these three, plus Chief Justice James Spigelman and University of Canterbury’s lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Music’s Jonathan Le Cocq, have in common?
They are all part of a panel, assembled by the Centre for Independent Studies, to discuss the topic: “Protecting the Legacy of Freedom: The Ideas of the Enlightenment in the 21st Century.”
Read More at "Centre for Independent Studies"
