Fellow Benedikt Löwe elected as Vice-President of International Humanities Council

Churchill College Fellow, Benedikt Löwe, has been elected to serve as one of the three Vice Presidents of the International Council for Philosophy and the Human Sciences (“Conseil International de la Philosophie et des Sciences Humaines”, or CIPSH), for a four-year period from 2023-2027.

CIPSH is the global Council for the Humanities, founded in 1949 upon suggestion of Sir Julian Huxley, the first Director-General of UNESCO, to act as an intermediary between UNESCO and the learned societies and national academies, extending UNESCO’s action in the domain of the humanities.

Today, CIPSH is the umbrella organisation of the global Unions of all arts and humanities disciplines, e.g., CISH (Comité international des Sciences Historiques), FISP (Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie), UIA (Union Internationale des Académies), WAU (World Anthropological Union), and many more. It coordinates international work and research across a huge range of academic centres and networks of scholars. It seeks to improve the communication among specialists from different disciplines, facilitate knowledge exchange and build connections in and across the field of philosophy, human sciences and related subjects.

Benedikt was elected by the CIPSH Executive Committee, on which he served from 2017 to 2023, and has just been re-elected for a further four years as Vice President.

Benedikt said, “I became involved in the International Humanities Council six years ago as a representative of the International Union for History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Philosophy of Science straddles the boundaries between the Humanities and the Sciences and links them: the Union is represented both in the International Humanities Council and the International Science Council. Therefore, I see my role as that of an intermediary between C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures: speaking on behalf of the humanities among the scientists and on behalf of the sciences among the humanities scholars. As Vice President of CIPSH, I shall keep an eye on including both sides of the cultural divide in the world of international academic governance.”

More information about CIPSH can be found at https://www.cipsh.one/