George Tarabishi, intellectual, writer, critic and translator, was born in 1939 in the city of Aleppo in north Syria. He graduated from the Arabic Literature Department at the University of Damascus, and worked for a short while as the director of the Damascus Radio and, then, as editor-in-chief of the Arab Studies magazine, before moving to Lebanon and later to France where he currently resides and dedicates himself to writing.

Tarabishi is a prolific writer and translator. He has translated over 200 books, including works by Freud, Hegel, Sartre and Garaudi. He also has authored a number of influential writings on Marxism, the nationalist theory, literary criticism.

His works include the "Philosophers' Dictionary," and his magnum opus, of which four volumes have so far appeared and which has been occupying him for the last 15 years: an analysis and critique of the work of the Moroccan author and intellectual, Mohamed al-Jaberi, titled "A Critique of the Arab Mind."

Tarabish's goal is to complete a survey of the basic philosophic, jurisprudential and linguistic concepts of the Classical Greek heritage, the European Enlightenment period and the Western schools of thought that followed it, as well as the Arabic and Islamic cultural heritage.

Having evolved himself ideologically from Baathism to Marxism, Existentialism and, finally, Liberalism, Tarabishi is well-positioned to undertake such a major, encyclopedic intellectual enterprise.

The wide and ambitious scope of Tarabishi's works, coupled with his acute critical skills and tendency to insert elements of psychoanalysis in his writings, have led him to be considered one of the most prominent Arab diagnosticians of the contemporary Arab condition.

In this regard, and in reference to the Arab drive towards modernity in the early and mid parts of the 20 th Centuries and the swift defeat suffered by the Arabs suffered at the hands of Israel in 1967, Tarabishi wrote:

"All our thinking and mental structures were focused on modern Western ideologies and works, be they Marxist, nationalist, socialist or unionist, which we transformed into sacred books. We cut ourselves off completely from a heritage that we viewed as no better than yellow books. With the failure of our "modernization" project, and the failure of our "revolution," which only succeeded in burning itself and us, and in the face of the loud collapse of ideologies which followed our discovery of the reality of the scandal linked with Marxism through a rule in its name that lasted for three quarters of a century, a major change took place, particularly following the 1967 defeat, with the spread of fundamentalist and violent ideas in the name of Islam."

Tarabishi believes that the culture of democracy cannot be separated from its institutional mechanisms, because this separation only serves to empower undemocratic actors, and allows for ethnic and religious disputes to grow. Tarabishi has been critical of the post 9/11 American interventions in the region on the grounds that its highly militaristic nature has been naïve, and has only served to exacerbate the   problems of the region rather than offering real solutions.