Weiming Tu

Tu Weiming, Chair Professor of Chinese History and Philosophy and of Confucian Studies at Harvard University and Senior Professor of Philosophy at Peking University, was born in Kunming and grew up in Taiwan. He received his B.A from Tunghai University in Taiwan, M.A and Ph.D from Harvard University.
Tu is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1988.
Tu has taught Chinese intellectual history, philosophies of China, and Confucian humanism at Tunghai University (1967-68), Princeton University (1967-71), University of California at Berkeley (1971-81), Peking University (1985), Taiwan University (1988), Ecole des Haute Etudes in Paris (1989). He has been teaching at Harvard since 1981.
He holds honorary professorships (comparable to honorary degrees) from Zhejiang, Sun Yat-sen, Suzhou, Renmin, Jinan, the Foreign Languages University and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, all in China.
He has been awarded honorary degrees from Lehigh, Michigan State (Grand Valley), Shandong (the highest honor confirmed by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China), Tunghai (Taiwan), Lingnan (Hong Kong), King`s College in London, and Macau University .
He was invited by the United Nations as a member of the Group of Eminent Persons to facilitate the Dialogue among Civilizations in 2001 and gave a presentation on civilizational dialogue to the Executive Board of UNESCO in 2004.
He was the recipient of the grand prize of International T’ogue Society, the second Thomas Berry award for Ecology and Religion presented at the United Nations, the Lifelong Achievement Award by the American Humanist Society, and the first Confucius Cultural Award (Qufu, 2009 ).
He gave a keynote address at the 20th World Congress of Philosophy in Boston (1998) and was invited to present the Maimonides Lecture at the 22th World Congress of Philosophy in Seoul (2008). He delivered a keynote address at World Congress of the History of Religions in Tokyo (2005). He is invited to be a distinguished lecturer at the 16th Congress of International Union of Anthropological and Ethnographic Studies in Kunming (July 2009) , a speaker at the plenary session at the 24th World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy in Beijing (September 2009) and a major presenter at the 2009 Parliament of Religions in Melbourne in December.
He is an international advisor of Rahman University in Kuala Lumpur and was elected as a representative of the Federation of International Philosophical Societies (FISP) in 2008. His is on the editorial boards of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Philosophy East and West, and Dao.
Tu has authored two monographs and several collections of essays in English. Tu’s five-volume collected work in Chinese was published in China in 2001.
He has been instrumental in developing discourse on dialogue among civilizations, Cultural China, reflection on the Enlightenment mentality of the modern West, and multiple modernities. He is currently studying the modern transformation of Confucian humanism in East Asia and tapping its spiritual resources for human flourishing in the global community.