According to The New York Times, Ali Larijani has effectively been running Iran since January 2026. He was in “charge of crushing, with lethal force, the recent protests demanding the end of Islamic rule.” [Source] He is now the key power broker in Iran’s transition.
A colleague alerts me to the suprising-to-me fact that Larijani is a Ph.D. in Western Philosophy and a specialist on Immanuel Kant. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Kant and followed that with these three published books:
* The Mathematical Method in Kant’s Philosophy
* Metaphysics and the Exact Sciences in Kant’s Philosophy
* Intuition and the Synthetic A Priori Judgments in Kant’s Philosophy
(I supposed I shouldn’t be suprised that these guys are never students of John Locke, Adam Smith, or John Stuart Mill.)
Related: My earlier post on Michel Foucault’s visit to Iran on the eve of its revolution. Also, my discussion of Kant’s basic philosophy and his ethics, in the Philosopher’s Explained series:
Image-of-Larijani credit: By Khamenei.ir, CC BY 4.0.