Professor emeritus of Chinese Language and Culture at Stockholm University

 

 

时间：2015年6月16日（星期二）3:30– 5:30 PM

地点：清华大学文南楼204会议室

Professor Torbjörn Lodén is Professor emeritus of Chinese Language and Culture at Stockholm University, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Security and Development Policy in Stockholm. From 1973 to 1976 he served as Cultural Attache at the Swedish Embassy in China, and during ten years, from 2004 to 2014, he was the Director of the Stockholm Confucius Institute. 2011-2014 he was a Visiting Professor at the City University of Hong Kong. In his research he has dealt mainly with various aspects of China’s intellectual history, from ancient times to the present, but he has also written about Chinese history, literature and politics. He has published several books and more than 150 articles, mainly in Swedish but also in English, Chinese and French.  

What are the political implications of basic philosophical orientations such as monism and dualism, materialism and idealism? Can one say that a monistic worldview tends to promote social and political change, while a dualistic view of the world is rather linked to political conservatism? Or is it the other way around? And what about materialism and idealism? Was the Soviet Gulag a logical outcome of the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx? Should we, as Max Weber argued, see the rise of capitalism in Europe as largely a result of the influence of the Protestant ethic, especially as espoused by John Calvin? In his lecture Professor Lodén will argue that the 18th century Chinese scholar Dai Zhen’s critique of Neo-Confucianism shows that such basic philosophical orientations are politically indeterminate and that we should base our philosophical views on intellectual criteria rather than on how basic philosophical ideas are used in practice to underpin various political views and actions.