Hosted by the Institute for Modern Chinese Thought and Culture and the Department of Philosophy at East China Normal University, the 2024 ECNU International Summer School of Philosophy will take place from August 11th to 24th at ECNU in Shanghai. With an eye towards the importance of new perspectives in addressing recent and historical developments in human civilization, this year’s theme will be “Doing World Philosophy Today: In the Age of the Fusion of ‘the Past, the Present, the Chinese and the Western’”. The summer school will explore pressing issues related to the interaction of the East, the West, the past and the present, as well as the potential for productive cooperation between philosophy and modern science and technology. These explorations will take various forms, including lectures given by professors from different countries, cross-civilizational and interdisciplinary seminars among peers, and field studies of “philosophizing by walking”.
August 11 –August 24, 2024
Department of Philosophy, East China Normal University
No.500 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai, China
Participants who are unable to attend onsite in Shanghai can choose to attend online.
English
Lectures by experts, peer-to-peer seminars, and field studies are included.
Senior experts from China and abroad have been invited to give lectures. The topics include: 1) Our time and philosophy; 2) Philosophical reflections on inter-civilizational contact; 3) Frontiers of Chinese philosophy; 4) Frontiers of applied ethics; 5) Computational philosophy and AI for philosophizing.
The summer school is open to undergraduate students, graduate students, and junior faculty members at overseas universities.
The summer school does not charge any tuition or fees. Successful applicants will receive free room and board during their stay in Shanghai. However, participants should pay their own travel costs.
20 participants
Application Requirements
1. Photographs or scans of applicant’s ID card/Passport and student ID card/employee’s card/other certification of current university.
2. Applicant’s CV including research interests, current and previous universities, etc.
3. A sample of a scholarly paper or representative academic paper written by the applicant.
Application methods
If you are interested, please submit your application by email to ecnuphilo123@163.com. Please use as your subject line either “Name+ affiliated University+ in person” or “Name+ affiliated University+ online”.
The deadline for applications is June 9, 2024. Successful applicants will be announced on June 11, 2024 on the website of the Department of Philosophy, that is, http://www.philo.ecnu.edu.cn.
Others
The Institute of Modern Chinese Thought and Culture and the Department of Philosophy at ECNU will award study certificates for participation in this summer school.
Professor Guorong Yang 杨国荣is a leading philosophical figure in China today. He is well-known for his study of the history of Chinese philosophy and his theory of “concrete metaphysics”. He is currently serving as the President of the International Society for Metaphysics (ISM), and the Chair of the Institute of Modern Chinese Thought and Culture at East China Normal University. Professor Yang is the author of more than 15 books, some of which have been translated into English. An entry on Professor Yang and his contribution to Chinese philosophy can also be found in Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2003). There are two special issues of Contemporary Chinese Thought to introduce his theory of concrete metaphysics and human affairs respectively.
Professor Yang Xiao 萧阳is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Kenyon College (USA) and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at East China Normal University. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research in New York, as well as Postdoctoral Fellowships from Harvard University and UC Berkeley. He has taught at the Sino-British-American Summer School of Philosophy in 2018 (“Chinese Philosophy”) and 2019 (“Environmental Philosophy”). He has served on the program committee of the APA (American Philosophical Association), the Review Committee for the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities), and as President of ISCWP (International Society for Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Philosophy). He has been teaching interesting and innovative courses in America and China, such as, “The Anthropocene as a Philosophical Problem”, “Hannah Arendt”, “Simone Weil”, and “The Somerville School of Philosophy”, a course on how four women philosophers revolutionized the study of ethics.
Professor Jennifer Welchman is the Interim Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Alberta and a founding director of the Canadian Society for Environmental Philosophy/Société Canadienne de Philosophie Environnementale (CSEP/SCEP). She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. She has researched and published on the theories of the classic American pragmatists (Dewey and William James), contemporaries such as G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and earlier figures such as John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, and David Hume. Her main areas of research and teaching expertise are in Ethics (Normative and Applied), the History of Moral Philosophy, and Environmental Ethics.
Professor Niels Weidtmann is the Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies and president of the Society for Intercultural Philosophy at the University of Tübingen, Germany. During his PhD he studied with the famous German phenomenologist Heinrich Rombach. He specializes in intercultural philosophy, phenomenology and hermeneutics, structural philosophy, and philosophy of science. He has published papers in journals such as Synthesis Philosophica, Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie and Phänomenologische Forschungen, and is the author of the monographs Interkulturelle Philosophie, Aufgaben-Wege-Dimensionen, Die Entdeckung des Raums als eines Systems um 1600, and others.
Professor Matthias Perkams holds the Professorship for Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität of Jena, Germany. His research focuses on the Aristotelian tradition and the development of philosophical understanding since antiquity. He is the founding editor of the book series Philosophy and Science in the Christian Orient (PSCO) and the managing director of the Center for Teacher Education at Jena University. He has published extensively in various journals and book series, and has led significant research projects funded by organizations like the DFG and the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung. He is also a member of several scholarly societies, including the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Philosophie (DGPhil) and the Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale (S. I. E. P. M.). He possesses extensive linguistic capabilities, covering ancient languages such as Greek, Latin, and Classical Arabic, and modern languages including English, French, and Russian.
Professor G. N. Devy is currently Professor of Eminence and Director of the School of Civilization at the Somaiya Vidyavihar University, Bombay, India. He was educated at Shivaji University, Kolhapur and the University of Leeds, UK. He held fellowships at Leeds University and Yale University and has been a THB Symons Fellow (1991-1992) and a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow (1994-1996). Professor Devy worked as Professor of Humanities at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information Technology (2003-2014), Gandhinagar, Honorary Professor at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Development Research, Dharwad (2015-2018), Obaid Siddiqi Chair Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences - TIFR, Bangalore (2022-2023).
Professor Weiguo Pang 庞维国 is a Professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Psychology and Cognitive Science of East China Normal University, president of the Daxia Academy, editor-in-chief of Popular Psychology, director of the Shanghai Key Research Base of Humanities and Social Sciences (Psychology), and chairman of the Shanghai Psychological Association. He specializes in creative psychology, learning psychology, and teaching psychology. He tries to bring classical Confucianism and modern psychology together to have a fruitful dialogue. He has been selected for the New Century Excellent Talents Support Program by the Ministry of Education and the Shanghai University Distinguished Professor (Oriental Scholar) Program.
Professor Quanmin Li 郦全民is a professor of the Department of Philosophy, East China Normal University. Specializing in philosophy of science and technology, he has published more than 50 academic papers in leading journals of philosophy and science such as Social Sciences in China, Philosophical Studies and Journal of Applied Physics. He is the author of Epistemology for Virtual Reality (co-author), The Computational View of the World, and The Structure of Contemporary Scientific Cognition.
Professor Zhenhua Yu 郁振华is the Co-director of the Knowledge and Action Lab, Joriss (Joint Research Institute for Science & Society), East China Normal University. He obtained one Ph.D. from East China Normal University and another from University of Bergen, Norway. He once worked at New York University as a Fulbright Scholar and at Harvard University as a Harvard-Yenching scholar. He specializes in Chinese philosophy and theory of knowledge. He is the author of How is Metaphysical Wisdom Possible? and The Tacit Dimension of Human Knowledge.
Professor Rongnan Zhang 张容南 is the Director of the Centre for Applied Ethics at East China Normal University. She was also a visiting scholar at Maquarie University, Australia. She specializes in political philosophy and applied ethics, publishing A Hermeneutic Discourse of Modernity: Charles Taylor’s Theory of Modernity (2012), Narrative Self: How We Understand Ourselves in a Narrative Way (2020), and No Worry about Growing Old: Care for the Elderly from the Perspective of Philosophical Ethics (2024, forthcoming).
Contact：Wang Yan汪燕，Rasmus Sandnes Haukedal
Email：ecnuphilo123@163.com
Institute of Modern Chinese Thought and Culture, East China Normal University
Department of Philosophy, East China Normal University
