下面是来自两所美国大学的信件。郝长墀教授在国外讲学后，邀请者以公函的形式对于讲座进行了反馈。

一来自西肯特基大学的信

To: Changchi Hao

Research Fellow in Comparative Philosophy at

Harvard-Yenching Institute

From: Arvin Vos

Interim Department Head

Department of Philosophy and Religion

Subject: Report on Lectures given October 23 & 24, 2006

Dear Changchi:

It was a great pleasure to have you come to our campus and to lecture to our students and faculty. The response which I have gotten from both the faculty and students has been that they found your lectures both informative and stimulating. Let me go into some detail.

The first lecture titled, “Suspension of Understanding and Will in the Encounter with the Other,” in which you compared the thought of Lao-Zhuang and St. Augustine on the understanding of encounter was especially appreciated by our upper-level students who have more preparation for the topic you were treating, either because they have read Augustine in a course that I teach or they had been introduced to the idea of the self which you reviewed in the lecture in their Modern and Contemporary Philosophy Class. We asked you to make your presentation not too technical for our students to follow and I think you succeeded admirably in that regard. That what you said was stimulating for us faculty was obvious from the fact that my colleague, Prof. Schoen and I both corresponded with you after, concerning some of the issues which you raised.

Just a few weeks ago we had an English speaking lecturer give a lecture in the same room, same format as you had and but he did not do as good a job in writing his lecture on a level that our students were able to follow him. That you were able to communicate so well in English to our students is impressive. The reason for this, I think, is that you had worked out the ideas carefully in your lecture and because it was clear they were able to follow your thought well.

The second lecture, on “Science and Democracy in 20^thCenturyChina,” was very helpful for the general audience which we had hoped to attract. Again, I thought we had a good crowd, around 150 faculty and students, and the feedback that I have gotten from them is that they found it very informative. Certainly it was very helpful for me and my colleagues also. One of the general goals at our university in the past few years is to become more internationally focused and your account of social thought in 20^thCenturyChinafit right in with this goal.

I was also impressed with the interactions which you had with my colleague, Will Hensen and some of the students who are interested in China, such as Brandon Johnston, who has gone on to study a semester in Beijing. My other colleagues, too, were stimulated by your presence with us for a few days. For me it was an opportunity to get to know some of your work better, and I must say that it was a very rewarding experience. While I had and have a few questions about your interpretation of Augustine, I very much enjoyed discussing the various points with you. I hope that we will have more opportunities for discussions in the future.

To sum up, your lectures and visit were a great success from our point of view. My colleagues and some from other departments have been very complimentary about your presentations. We are all impressed about how well you communicate your ideas in English. To think clearly is an accomplishment, but then to express the ideas clearly in an other language is even more impressive. I hope we will have more contact in the future, because we have a lot to learn from you.

二 来自西彻斯特大学的信

May 5, 2008

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

I write to you about DR. CHANGCHI HAO, who gave two lectures in the Dept. of Philosophy atWest ChesterUniversity(nearPhiladelphia) onWednesday March 26, 2008. Dr. Hao is a professor atWuhan University,Hubei,China, and is on leave to do research at Harvard (2006-07) and Baylor (2007-08). Students and faculty present at his lectures found Prof. Hao to be an excellent communicator. I found these two lectures enormously stimulating and want to invite Dr. Hao back at the earliest opportunity.

One lecture was “Love of Wisdom and Wisdom of Love: Two Perspectives”. It focused on how the early Chinese philosophers viewed “wisdom” and “love”. It was argued that early Chinese philosophical thought is inseparable from historical and societal processes. The basic question here is about human relations or “how to be a self.” The Chinese self finds meaning both in history and in current human relations. One main finding is that there are four different concepts of self correlated with four different concepts of love. Importantly, Dr. Hao maintains that prior to the Qin-dynasty the idea of human existence changes from a concrete self to an abstract self.

The other paper was “The Concept of Love in Early Chinese Philosophy”. This paper focused on the “period of the hundred philosophers” of pre-Qin times. The main idea was that Universal love in its original sense is the love of the Dao, and the selfhood of the self is constituted in its relation to the Dao. I especially enjoyed Dr. Hao’s discussion ofwu-wei(“non-striving” literally, “non-action”, “non-being”) which is one of the most important concepts inDaoDeJing.

These two lectures had great attendance, and many students asked interesting questions. Students were especially interested in knowing how and why the West andChinahave different perspectives on philosophical matters. My colleague Prof. Wei Yang in the Foreign Languages Department is a specialist in Chinese language, and he told me that Prof. Hao’s lectures were very effective and useful to him in deepening his understanding of Chinese philosophy. My perceptive, advanced students, Dawn Manning and Tim Burke, especially appreciated Prof. Hao’s talks. Prof. Hao has a very skillful way of answering philosophical questions by undergraduates. He was also willing to meet with my students informally in a campus coffee shop. The result of these conversations was that he became even more popular. Emails were exchanged and I expect that my students and faculty friends will communicate with him in the future to the benefit of bothWuhanUniversityandWest ChesterUniversity.

Dr. Hao works very well and in a flexible manner with American students and faculty in our educational context. For example, we had a sudden change of venue when all the students interested did not fit in the room, and Dr. Hao was very flexible and easy-going when this happened. He is clearly a fine philosopher and man ofDao.

Sincerely,

Frank J. Hoffman, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Associate Director of Ethnic Studies