Workshop: “Historical developments of Confucius in China”

The French Cultural Center (Institut de France) - L'Espace cordially invites you to attend the seminar "Historical developments of the figure of Confucius in China""by Anne Cheng,Sinologist, expert on the History of Chinese Thought at the Collège de France.

Time:Thursday, October 11, 2018 at 5:30 p.m.

Location:French Cultural Center Hall

24 Trang Tien, Hanoi

French-Vietnamese parallel translation

About the workshop:

Although the figure of Confucius (551-479) alone seems to have created a cultural phenomenon that was inseparable from the fate of the entire Chinese civilization, his appearance in the background of the Analects is full of mystery and paradox: unlike his contemporaries such as the Buddha or the pre-Socratic philosophers, Confucius was neither a philosopher who gave birth to an ideology nor the founder of a faith or a religion. At first glance, his thinking seems pragmatic, his teachings are based on the obvious, and he himself almost considered his own life a failure. So we have every reason to wonder why Confucius has such a special stature in history?

The aim of the seminar was to explain the enduring value of Confucius' teachings, which, despite the ups and downs of history, have been a source of inspiration for the past two thousand five hundred years in China and are still very popular in today's society.

Speaker introduction:

Anne ChengBorn in 1955 in Paris, to Chinese parents, she spent her entire education in France, nurtured by the spirit of classical and European humanism, studied at the Pedagogical University, and then decided to devote herself entirely to the study of China. For nearly 30 years, she has been teaching and researching the history of Chinese spirituality, especially Confucianism, within the framework of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), then within the framework of the Institute of Oriental Languages ​​and Civilizations (INALCO), after which she was appointed to the French University and most recently, elected to the Collège de France.

She is the author of the French translation of the book.Analects- Confucius (Seuil Publishing House, 1981), is the author of a book on Confucianism and a bookHistory of Chinese Thought(Seuil Publishing House, 1997, reprinted in 2002 and translated into many languages). She is also the editor of many collective works, including the most recentThought in China Today(Gallimard, 2007).