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19.05.2026
Workshop: "The Beginning: Pluralistic Perspectives in East and West"
Thursday-Saturday, May 21–23, 2026, Seminarraum, China Centrum Tübingen(CCT), Hintere Grabenstr. 26, 72070 Tübingen
The Beginning: Pluralistic Perspectives in East and West
起初：东西方多元视角探讨
About the Workshop
The common parlance says that every beginning is hard. What actually constitutes the alleged difficulty in getting started? May it be that apart from objective elements we also must consider subjective or psychological elements? Manifestly, beginnings create a high level of contingency and hence pose great challenges to decision-makers and actors. In coping with these challenges, positive energies are being released. In retrospective, beginnings therefore tend to become fixed stars of identity formation. This is the “magic” that dwells in every beginning, as Hermann Hesse has it. In the Chinese tradition, these magical moments are referred to as “germs” (ji 幾), which we must recognize in order to seize the glittering opportunities in the air. It becomes clear that the notion of beginnings encompass not only such sort of magical thinking, but also manifold questions of cosmology, mythology, ontology, theology, ethics and aesthetics, as well as connotations of spontaneity, autopoiesis and momentum of its own. The exploration of this notion thus provides a useful forum for an interdisciplinary and intercultural debate and critical review of a variety of methodological approaches to such explorations.
In the course of mutual visits of delegations from Beijing Normal University and the University of Tübingen in the
recent years, two key areas of advancing the two universities’ cooperation and exchange were identified:
philosophy and educational science, including teachers’ education. To get this cooperation and the exchange
especially among young scholars started, two kick-off workshops on these two areas were agreed upon. Taking
the lead, this workshop features the beginning within the horizon of philosophy.
Please check the flyer for more information:
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