Confucius Institute Distinguished Lecture Series

PROFESSOR KAI VOGELSANG

UNIVERSITY OF HAMBURG

Getting the Terms Straight: Politics, State & Law in the Discourse of Chinese 'Legalism'.

Thursday 19 May 2016 - 18:00 -19:30

University of Edinburgh, Project Room, 50 George Square,

Edinburgh EH8 9JU

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception All welcome. No booking required.

'Legalism' is a stepchild of Chinese tradition. Long neglected by Chinese and Western scholars alike, it has until today not been properly understood. The burden of traditional terminology especially seems to have weighted down sinological scholarship and blocked inter-disciplinary approaches to the topic. This talk will focus on some central terms of 'legalist' discourse - including 'legalism' itself - in an attempt to reach a clearer understanding of this part of Chinese tradition which is by no means a quantité negligéable.

Kai Vogelsang is professor of Sinology at the University of Hamburg. He studied Sinology and Economics in Hamburg and Taipei receiving a PhD in Hamburg (1997) and subsequently in Munich (2004). His fields of research are Chinese history of the pre-Qin period and the late 19th/early 20th centuries with a focus on conceptual history.