Author’S Biography Ivan Illich

Author’s biography Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich (1926-2002), was born in Vienna (Austria) on September 4, 1926, was a writer, historian, pedagogue, philosopher, literary critic, anthropologist, priest and austrian, multifaceted and controversial thinker, related to anarchism. His family showed a history of Jews, Dalmatians and Catholics. At birth he was evicted by doctors, but despite this, the newborn survived. Very young he knew exile and his family was threatened by Nazism.

He lived with his maternal grandfather from 1936 to 1941, in Vienna; He was then considered as a Jewish means. In 1941 he had to flee to Italy, there he studied histology and graduated at the University of Florence, in Crystallography with Honors. Between 1942 and 1946 he studied and graduated in theology and philosophy with the highest honors, at the Gregorian Pontifical University of Rome. Years later he ordered as a priest, and did not agree to work as a diplomat in the Vatican, on the other hand, he preferred to work in New York as an assistant parish priest. In 1956 he was appointed as a Vice Chancellor in Puerto Rico, specifically at the Catholic University.

In 1966, he founded the Intercultural Documentation Center (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, was founded with the collaboration of Valentina Borremans, Fedora Stancioff and Gerry Morris. This research center taught Latin American language and culture to the American missionaries who became a space for reflection and criticism in which great thinkers like Paul Goodman, Erich fromm, Paulo Freire, or Sergio Méndez Arceo, among others, met, among others.

At the end of the 60s, he requested and obtained a dispensation for the priestly exercise, which is a permit that authorizes a person for breach of the ordered. After ten years of fruitth work, the publications and ‘ideas’ emanating from the Cidoc confronThere they worked and the agreement to distribute the product of their liquidation equally. Some of them established language schools in Cuernavaca, and thus began an important cultural economic phenomenon.

From the 80s, he traveled intensely, and distributed his time between the United States of America, Mexico and Germany. He made a stay as a visiting professor of Philosophy and ‘Science, Technology and Society’ at the State University of Pennsylvania, and taught seminars and meetings at the University of Brema.

During the last twenty years of his life he suffered a cancer process of tumors, in his initial phase of the diagnosis they gave him a life expectancy of just a few months, but he came to survive almost twenty more years. In congruence with his criticism of institutionalized medicine, he refused to treat him with ‘professional’ methods and he took care of his illness himself. If you practiced the therapeutic techniques of meditation and yoga. The last years of life smoked opium as analgesic, to face the tremendous pain caused by the tumor. Illich died on December 2, 2002 in Bremen, Germany at 76 years of age.