This week I travelled to Wuhan University to give a series of three lectures. Wuhan is the capital of Hubei and is located in central China, up the Yangtse River from Nanjing and Shanghai. The School of Philosophy at Wuhan University is one of the largest and finest in China. The first lecture, a general introduction to comparative philosophy, I delivered in English, and was mainly aimed at students. The second and third were more technical, drawn from my current research and aimed at graduate students and faculty; both the lectures and the discussion were all in Chinese. (While the students mostly had quite good English, faculty -- especially those concentrating on Chinese philosophy -- often did not.) It was a blast; I was nervous about the Chinese lectures but I think they went well. Audiences for each lecture averaged around 50 people. In addition to the formal lectures, I ended up offering a seminar on my human rights research for students in the law school, as well as a few other meetings with faculty and students, not to mention a couple formal dinners and lunches. Luckily only one dinner involved significant toasting with Maotai firewater!

 

The campus was large and quite beautiful, especially since the week I was there all the cherry trees were in bloom (see top-right). Apparently the campus was commandeered by the Japanese as their local headquarters during World War II, and planned to stay long enough that they planted trees! Some on campus now apparently favor cutting all the trees down, but so far cooler heads have prevailed.

 

The lower-right picture is, you guessed it, Confucius, from the central courtyard of the School of Philosophy building. In the middle picture, you can see the main administrative building in the background, overlooking a large playing field. Mao Zedong apparently gave a famous speech to throngs of students here back in the 1950s, standing on the platform above the large umbrella.