Hassan Hanafi was born in Cairo in 1935, obtained a Bachelor of Arts in the Department of Philosophy in 1956, then traveled to France at his own expense, and obtained a doctorate in philosophy from the Sorbonne University, for two theses, which he translated into Arabic and published in 2006 under the title: “The Interpretation of Phenomenology” and “The Phenomenology of Interpretation,” and spent about ten years preparing them.
He also worked as a scientific advisor at the United Nations University in Tokyo during the period (1985-1987), and was Vice-President of the Arab Philosophical Society, and Secretary-General of the Egyptian Philosophical Society.
He headed the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, and taught in a number of Arab and foreign universities; In Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Germany, America and Japan
Hanafi mourned a number of Egyptian intellectuals and public figures, including the President of Cairo University, Muhammad Othman Al-Khasht, who said in his obituary the obituary of the professor and philosopher Dr. Hassan Nanafi…the great academic value and the distinguished person.
Hanafi was preoccupied with the issue of “heritage and renewal”, and he has written many books, including: “Models of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages”, “Introduction to the Science of Occidentalism”, “From Extinction to Survival”, and other publications.
Hanafy received several awards in Egypt and abroad, such as: the State Appreciation Prize in Social Sciences in 2009, the Nile Prize for Social Sciences Branch in 2015, as well as the Free Thinker Prize from Poland.
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