On January 4^th and 5^th, the Institute for Advanced Research in Humanities and Social Sciences invited Hong Kong City University’s Professor of Chinese, translation and linguistics Dr Zhang Longxi as guest lecturer for the Humanities Lecture Series. The venue was the lecture hall located on the first floor in the Program of East Asia Classics and Culture (formerly the Research Center of East Asia Civilizations) building.

The first lecture was held in the morning of January 4^th. Professor Zhang Longxi ‘s lecture topic was “The Basic Concepts of Hermeneutic.” He first talked about the etymological meaning of “hermeneutic”, pointing out that both Eastern and Western traditions have distinct interpretations of the gap between surface and reality. In the second lecture, Professor Chang took one step further by choosing the topic “Classics, authority and cultural tradition,” in which he pointed out that there were inseparable relations between language, text, classics, tradition and hermeneutic. The last lecture was held in the morning of January 5^th, and his chosen topic was “Language, art, and aesthetic consciousness.”

The video taping of these lectures will be posted on NTU's speech website within days. Any interested party can log onto http://speech.ntu.edu.tw/user/index.php for viewing at will. The full text of these lectures will also be published in the next issue of “Taiwan East Asian Civilization Research Journal” , which is a periodical belonging to the Institute for Advanced Research in Humanities and Social Sciences. Faculty and students are advised to pay close attention.