On the morning of June 14th 2017,Dr. Andrew Lambert from the City University of New York was invited to delivera lecture titled “Reconceptualising Friendship, Rethinking Morality” at theCenter for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. The lecture was hosted byProfessor Xu Hai, and warmly welcomed by the participating teachers andstudents.
Dr. Lambertstarted the lecture with guiding questions like “What is friendship?” “What is therelationship between friendship and morality?” and reveled that, in seeking theanswers, researchers had found inconsistence or even conflict existing betweenimpartial standpoint and close friendship. To figure out the situation andalleviate the tension between the two, Dr. Lambert turned to Confucian account,the Chinese philosophy, of morality and friendship, which accentuates harmonyand sees it as the moral conduct principle. In line with this, Dr. Lambertargues that activities that seek harmonious state, though sometimes biased,still belong to the category of friendship, a friendship named event friendship.According to Dr. Lambert, emerging from affective experience, the event friendshipis a kind of moral conduct that bases itself in cognitive skills and sees delightas its goal, which provides a new perspective to study friendship, thus alleviatingthe tension existing between the impartial standpoint and the close friendship.
Ininteraction with the participating teachers and learners, Dr. Lambert talkedabout categorizing the friendship in detail, whichadvanced our understanding of friendship from the perspective of philosophy.