Dr. Klaus Vieweg is Professor of Philosophy at Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany and Guest Professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai, China. He is a leading expert on Hegel (1770-1831), the great German Idealist philosopher, and has published many books and monographs in several languages including German, English, and Italian. His most recent books include a new biography of Hegel, Hegel. Der Philosophie der Freiheit (Munich: 2019), and The Idealism of Freedom: For a Hegelian Turn in Philosophy (Boston/Leiden: 2020). He has delivered many lectures at many universities and academic institutions worldwide including NYU, SUNY at Stonybrook, and Yale in the US, Fudan University in Shanghai, China as well as Japan Society for Promotion of Science in Tokyo.

In this lecture, Professor Vieweg will argue that Parmenides’s Being, the Buddhist notion of Nothingness, and Heraclitus’s notion of Becoming constitute three bedstones for the beginning of philosophy understood in the ideal-typical and paradigmatic sense. In doing so, he will bring together the more traditional view regarding the beginning of Western philosophy found in Hegel’s Science of Logic and the Buddhist thinkings on Nothingness found in Nagarjuna and Fazang in a West-Eastern divan.

Campus community only, please.

Sponsored by the Chinese and Japanese Department and Office of the Dean of the Faculty. Co-sponsored by the Departments of German Studies, Greek and Roman Studies, Philosophy, and Religion, and by the Asian Studies Program.