On 21 October 2019, ICS Luncheon had invited Prof. Lau Kwok Ying from the Department of Philosophy, CUHK, to deliver a talk on “China and European Philosophers in 17th & 18th Centuries: China’s Role in the Formation of Modern European Disenchanted World-view”.

Prof. Lau graduated with a BA Philosophy from CUHK (1979) and a PhD Philosophy from the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne (1993). He specializes in phenomenology, contemporary French philosophy and intercultural phenomenology. He is currently Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, CUHK, and Programme Director of MA in Philosophy, CUHK, as well as Director of Edwin Cheng Foundation Asian Centre for Phenomenology and Associate Director of Institute for the Humanities, CUHK. He also serves as the founding editor-in-chief of Journal of Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (in Chinese), founding member of the research network P.E.A.CE (Phenomenology for East-Asian CirclE), and founder of the Master Class in Phenomenology for Asian Scholars. Prof. Lau received the 2017 CUHK Outstanding Research Award. His monograph, Phenomenology and Intercultural Understanding: Toward a New Cultural Flesh, had been awarded the 2019 Outstanding Phenomenological Works Prize from the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, USA.

Prof. Lau shared how the impact of foreign cultures played a role in the formation of Modern European Disenchanted World-view and how it affected the Enlightenment in Europe and the Christian’s worldview at the time. The talk specifically explained how the Chinese chronology and etiquette controversies have become the two major debates between the European philosophers and intellectuals during seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and how Chinese natural theology caused a great conflict and impact on the European society. Prof. Lau brought the audience to the same period of the history of both China and Europe, so that the context of history could be better understood.