Academician Zhang Longxi was Employed as an Honorary Professor of WHU and Gave a Lecture at the 317th "Luojia Lecture"

On November 18, 2019, Zhang Longxi, Chair Professor of the Department of Chinese and History of City University of Hong Kong, Foreign Academician of the Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquity, Foreign Academician of the Department of Literature and Drama of the European Academy of Sciences (Academia Europaea), was employed as an honorary professor at Wuhan University and he gave a lecture at the 317^thLuojia Lecture on "The Beautiful World in the History of Western Thought".

In the lecture, Academician Zhang Longxi took the French enlightenment thinker Voltaire's novelCandideas the object, and systematically sorted out the development of Western humanism in the 18th century. He believes that in any situation, people want to live a better life and hope for a better world, so they always have a utopian aspiration. But the real world is often not as good, sometimes even full of pain and evil. This eternity dilemma has plagued Western thinkers, from Thomas Um'sUtopia, John Milton's long epicParadise Lostto Leibniz'sTheodicyetc., all of them are about this issue. In 1755, a major earthquake struck Lisbon, and the French enlightenment master Voltaire was psychologically shaken. After that, he completed the novelCandideand put forward his own views on the pursuit of a beautiful world. At the end of the lecture, Academician Zhang Longxi pointed out that the "good world" in human social life is not only an absolute concept, but also a "balance process". Both Voltaire in the West and Tao Yuanming in China shared similar emotions when it comes to this issue. The true utopia certainly does not exist. How to build a better world is a big issue for human society to think about.