Researchers and experts in various fields from a number of universities in Canada, Belgium, and France attended the event.
Presentations at the seminar focused on Tran Duc Thao’s formation of ideas as well as his significant contributions to world philosophy.
Tran Duc Thao was born on September 26, 1917 in the northern Vietnamese province of Bac Ninh. He studied at the L’Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris from 1936 to 1943, ultimately earning a doctorate in philosophy. In late 1951, he returned to Vietnam and joined the resistance war against the French colonists. He was appointed professor of philosophy and Deputy Director of the Literary Pedagogy University, as well as Head of the History Department under the University of Hanoi, in 1955.
In 1991, he returned to France in ill health and died in Paris on April 24, 1993.
He was posthumously awarded the Ho Chi Minh Prize for social sciences by the Vietnamese State in 2000. His books ‘Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism’ (1951), ‘The Phenomenology of Mind and Its Real Content’ (1971), and ‘Investigations into the Origins of Language and Consciousness’ (1973) brought him international acclaim.
