On January 6 and 7, the sixteenth CoStone Master Forum witnessed informative talks on The Value of Life in Western Culture. Professor Xu Jilin at East China Normal University, Professor He Huaihong at Peking University, Professor Sun Xiangchen at Fudan University and Professor Wang Qingjie at the Chinese University of Hong Kong explored the topic deeply in the forum.

On January 6 and 7, the sixteenth CoStone Master Forum witnessed informative talks on The Value of Life in Western Culture. Professor Xu Jilin at East China Normal University, Professor He Huaihong at Peking University, Professor Sun Xiangchen at Fudan University and Professor Wang Qingjie at the Chinese University of Hong Kong explored the topic deeply in the forum.

He Huaihong on Greek Philosophies of Life

 Professor He lectured on the ancient Greeks' political ideas, moral sentiments, and understandings of goodness and obligations from five aspects: pursuing excellence and loving wisdom; knowing yourself; seeking truth and upholding justice; learning human nature and mastering your destiny; and following the mean principle and understanding happiness. He then applied the ancient Greek philosophies to the modern life, which provided an inspirational perspective on life.

Sun Xiangchen on The Life and Death in Christian Culture

 Professor Sun also divided his speech into five parts: traditional understandings of the meaning of life; the basic content of Christian doctrine; death in the Old Testament and the New Testament; death in Christian culture; and the way to lead a meaningful life in the modern world.

Wang Qingjie on The Meaning of Life in Modern Western Philosophy

Professor Wang's lecture included three main points. They were the value and meaning of human life, the status of man in western "modernity" and the survival crisis of "humans" and the hope of "being-towards-death" in the post-modern context.

Dialogue: Between Poetry and Cruelty

 The last part of the forum was an in-depth dialogue among the four professors moderated by Professor Xu. The first half of the dialogue centered on "life" and the second half on "death". From the perspective of western philosophy, the professors offered answers to the problems related to life people encountered every day.

Speaker

He Huaihong

He Huaihong is a doctor of philosophy and Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Peking University. In the 1980s, he focused on western philosophy, Ethics and translation, having translated A Theory of Justice,Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and The System of Ethics into Chinese. Since the 1990s, he has been devoted to writing articles on principles of ethics and Chinese history and culture. He has started to research on applied ethics and pays close attention to the relationship between spiritual beliefs and modern society. Reflection on Life and Morality·God and Man are his representative works.

Sun Xiangchen

Sun Xiangchen is a doctor of philosophy and professor. His areas of particular interest include modern western philosophy, enlightenment philosophy, political philosophy, Jewish and Christian philosophy, phenomenology, French philosophy and comparative philosophy. He was a visiting scholar at the Department of Philosophy, Peking University, Regent College, Yale University, the Institute of Sino-Christian Studies, the University of Birmingham, the Munich School of Philosophy, the University of Chicago and National Taiwan University.

Wang Qingjie

Wang Qingjie is Professor at the Department of Philosophy, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on contemporary western continental philosophy, the comparative philosophy between the west and the east and moral philosophy. As a representative scholar studying Heidegger, he is the author of Heidegger: Translation, Understanding and Interpretation and Heidegger and the Beginning of Philosophy, and the translator of Introduction to Metaphysics and Being and Time.

Xu Jilin

Xu Jilin is Professor and PhD Supervisor at the Department of History, East China Normal University, Vice President and General Secretary of Shanghai History Association, Member of the Board of Directors, Association of Chinese Historians, Member of Shanghai Federation of Social Science Associations, and Member of the Editorial Board of Twenty-First Century. His research has been focusing on the history of Chinese thoughts and the intellectuals in the 20 century, and on the urban culture in Shanghai.

Rewritten by Jiang Xiaomei, Edited by Li Yunzhen, Du Zhixin, Wei Yiyi