This talk proposes a phenomenological reading of the ancient Chinese Daoist text Daodejing (《道德經》, also Romanized as Tao Te Ching) ascribed to Laozi (also Romanized as Lao-Tzu or Lao-Tsu). It begins by a critical discussion of the two diametrically opposite modes of reception of philosophical Daoism by contemporary Western scholars, namely that Daoist philosophy is anti-rationalism on the one hand, and on the other it is one of the hidden sources of Heidegger’s later philosophy. After a critical discussion of these two extremist readings of philosophical Daoism, we will present the elements of a phenomenological reading of Daodejing from his own appropriation of the conceptual constellation developed in the phenomenological movement understood in the broad sense of the term. This reading will go along the following three lines: 1. The dao as inchoative nature; 2. Deployment of the dao by the movement of dialectic and retrieval in the sense of hyperdialectic suggested by the last Merleau-Ponty; 3. Characteristics of the dao as vacuity and quietude as well as tenderness and weakness. This phenomenological reading of the Daodejing is meant to highlight the non-anthropocentric nature and the critical potential of Laozi’s philosophical Daoism.

Time：22/5/2019(Wednesday)
Place：1st Floor Conference Room, Information Build.,NCCU

This talk attempts at a reconstruction of Husserl’s encounter with Buddhism, with the view to understand the philosophical implications of Buddhism from the perspective of phenomenology, as well as the influence of this encounter on the later development of Husserl’s thought. Based on Husserl’s 1925 short review article on the German translation of some Buddhist Scriptures, we will show that the father of phenomenology manifested an initial enthusiasm toward Buddhism rarely seen in his other writings. Husserl praised the Buddhist attitude as a way of overcoming mundane world interests comparable to his own transcendental phenomenological attitude. Thus Husserl had projected the hope on the Buddhist Scriptures as an ethical-religious source of superlative quality for cultural renewal. In a later manuscript “Sokrates—Buddha”, Husserl expressed his further thoughts on Buddhism by comparing the Buddha to Socrates. To Husserl the Buddha advocates a supreme ethical practical ideal—liberation and bliss—by means of ruthless cognition in view of leading an accomplished moral life. This Buddhist attitude is no different from Socrates’ pursuit of a coherent life of virtue guided by the Delphic maxim of “know thyself”. Husserl seems to suggest that the Buddha is on a par with Socrates by introducing a theoretical attitude which serves a supreme ethical telos. But on further analysis, it will be shown that in Husserl’s final judgment on Buddhism, the latter does not satisfy the requirements of a genuine universal philosophy because it does not embrace Husserl’s own idea of a universal science. This betrays once again Husserl’s fundamental cognitivist conception of philosophy, though he had very acute observations on the crisis of European civilization and showed sincere practical concerns about it.

Time：24/5/2019(Friday)
Place：1st Floor Conference Room, Information Build.,NCCU

The Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka (1907-1977) is the first non-Eurocentric phenomenological philosopher and represents the critical consciousness of the phenomenological movement. Different from Husserl and Heidegger, Patočka raised explicitly the problems of a “Post-European humanity” after conducting profound philosophical reflections on the aporia of the meaning of history, and emphasized the necessity of abandoning the hitherto Eurocentric propositions of solution to the crisis of European civilization. Inspired by Aristotle’s Physics, Patočka has formulated a profound phenomenology of the natural world insufficiently thematized in Husserl and absent in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Such a phenomenology of the natural world includes the themes of the Earth as well as those of movement and human existence as movement, themes which form the basic elements and the ground of phenomenality of all inner-worldly beings. Patočka’s reflections also bring into light the primacy of the practical over the theoretical within the natural world which paves the way for a phenomenology of the cultural world. In virtue of its emphasis on the structural characteristics of movement, of dynamis, of praxis, and of the disclosure of the abyssal, unfathomable nature of human existence and of the original nothingness as the (non-)foundation of the phenomenal world, Patočka’s phenomenology of the natural world constitutes an opening toward the reception of Others and other cultures which are not dominated by scientific positivism, in particular that of Chinese Daoist philosophy.

Time：27/5/2019(Monday)
Place：1st Floor Conference Room, Information Build.,NCCU

The event of the September-11 terrorist attack of 2001 shows that a disenchanted world-view is one of the conditions of possibility of intercultural understanding. The disenchantment of the world as a concept—the tentative to explain the origin, the changes and the ultimate goal of development of the world by supra-natural factors is declared invalid—was formulated by Max Weber at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, diagnosed by Nietzsche prior to the invention of this term in the second part of the Nineteenth Century, and philosophically worked out in its essential ingredients by Kant’s critical philosophy at the high time of European Enlightenment in the late Eighteenth Century. Yet the growth of the disenchanted world-view in Europe, we hope to show, is not a purely European affair. An important cultural factor which arrived from outside of Europe had come into play, namely the reception of Chinese culture and the debates during the “Chinese chronology controversy” and the “Chinese rites controversy” in the Seventeenth and the Eighteen Centuries among European philosophers and intellectuals around the history and nature of this cultural Other of Europe. The knowledge of Chinese history and the understanding of the atheist nature of Chinese culture had exercised a great shock on the Christian world-view held hithertho by Europeans. Views and positions of selected representative figures who have taken part in the debate (Malebranche, Leibniz, Wolff and Voltaire) will be discussed to show how intercultural understanding around a concrete issue has been taking place in Europe and how Eurocentrism has been repudiated by avant-guard thinkers in Europe some three centuries ago.

Time：22/5/2019(Wednesday)
Place：1st Floor Conference Room, Information Build.,NCCU

This talk introduces the idea of “orientative philosophy” proposed by Lao Sze-Kwang (1927-2012) to understand the basic characteristics and interest of Chinese philosophy. Lao’s characterization of orientative philosophy as reflective thinking which aims at bringing about “self-transformation” and “transformation of the world” has the advantage of providing a key to understand the famous ethical turn of Foucault shown in the later volumes of his History of Sexuality and in The Hermeneutics of the Subject. In fact, the last Foucault uses precisely the terms “transformative test of the self”, “self-transformation into moral subject”, or “transformation of the subject”, close to Lao’s “self-transformation”, to bring to a new light the essence of philosophical activity in Greek and Roman Antiquity. Foucault proposes to characterize the form of philosophical activity in Western Antiquity as “spirituality” after Pierre Hadot in distinction to philosophy in its modern form since Descartes.
Yet we find that Husserl’s practice of the phenomenological method of epoché and reduction, as an act leading to the self-transformation of the philosophizing subject, shares features of spirituality as understood by Foucault. It is on the basis of the self-transformation of the human subject, through which she discovers and comes to terms with her own subjectivity, that the phenomenological philosopher is engaged in an act of radical responsibility toward herself, enabling her to carry out the mission of being “functionaries of humankind” as prescribed by Husserl in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Motivated by this supreme ethical telos, the basic attitude underlying the phenomenological attitude is arguably also ethical and practical in nature. Thus Lao Sze-Kwang’s idea of orientative philosophy can serve as a bridge between ancient and contemporary Western philosophies on the one hand, and between contemporary Eastern and Western philosophers on the other.

Time：31/5/2019(Friday)
Place：1st Floor Conference Room, Information Build.,NCCU