# Ian Kluge (1948-2023)

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-20 — 1 clipping.*

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Sholeh A. Quinn, Ian Kluge (1948-2023), bahai-library.com.
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> 
> Ian Kluge
> 
> 1948-2023
> 
> Ian Kluge was an active and enthusiastic participant in the Irfan Col-
> loquium gatherings from 2002-2016. His presence will be missed by
> all who knew him. He had wide-ranging interests in philosophical
> traditions and the intellectual history of religious thought. He pub-
> lished some 27 papers in the Lights of Irfan volumes, two of which he
> co-authored with Wolfgang Klebel. The topics these papers covered
> include Neoplatonism, Nietzsche, Ontology, minimalism, relativism,
> ethics, freedom, Aristotelianism, meta-history, New Atheism, and
> many others. Some of the topics that he explored had previously received
> very little scholarly attention. These papers were all substantial—for
> example, his two-part article on neo-Platonism numbered some 142
> pages. He exhaustively mined the Baha’i writings for relevant passages
> to the topics he was researching, and at the same time read widely in the
> scholarship of the philosophical traditions that he analyzed.
> 
> Ian Kluge was a wonderful lecturer, and his talks were always engaging
> and entertaining, no doubt a result of the many years he spent as a sea-
> soned and sage-like school teacher. He never read from his papers and
> had a particular talent for taking complex ideas and making them acces-
> sible to non-specialists. Irfan Colloquium participants will remember
> and appreciate how he generously brought copies of his papers with
> him and distributed them to his audience. He was most approachable,
> always encouraging people to ask questions during his talks, and if peo-
> ple wanted to continue their discussions with him after the colloquium,
> he invited further dialog, having shared his email address and contact
> information before he even started his talk.
> 
> His legacy remains enshrined in his papers available to read in the Lights
> of Irfan volumes.
> 
> —Sholeh Quinn
>
> — *Ian Kluge (1948-2023) (Used by permission of the curator)*