On June 10, in the afternoon, at the invitation of School of Philosophy and Sociology, Lanzhou University, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore philosophy professor Li Chenyang gave online academic lectures titled "friendship and moral tension" .Prof.Chen, dean of the School of philosophy and society as a host, Shang Jianfei, Zhang Yanliang, Wang Hanqing participated in the discussion, academic platform synchronized with live this lecture,a total of 518 views.

 Professor Li Chenyang expressed his thanks to Lanzhou University for its sincere invitation before the lecture. Then Professor Li Chenyang first put forward a question: what is friendship? With this question in mind, he introduced the general contents of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and then explained the ancient Greek and Ancient Chinese definitions of friendship. From these definitions, three elements of friendship are further summarized: mutual care, intimacy and shared activities.

 Then the key part of this lecture came to-- the relationship between friendship and morality. Professor Li Chenyang summarized the relationship between friendship and morality as follows: consistency; Contradiction; Independence; A Confucian solution.

 He expounded the consistency of what is moral, through the Chinese traditional Confucian thought, the ancient Greek Aristotle, Cicero, three kinds of friendship "on friendship" of "friendship is to be consistent with moral and Christian views and Kant thought" friendship is love and he loved the combination of "the many examples of fully shows the consistency between morality and friendship.

 Then they discussed the core of the relationship between friendship and morality, which is, the tension between friendship and morality. On this issue, there are two mainstream views. One is that friendship and morality are contradictory. Second, friendship and morality are independent relations. In the first view, he first used Kierkegaard's example of the contradiction between self-love and love of humanity to illustrate the contradiction between friendship and morality. In the second view, he mainly introduced the two scholars who originally proposed this view. The two scholars argued that friendship is independent of morality, and sometimes requires us to act in ways that run counter to morality. Then, some practical cases are used to further interpret this view. Finally, Professor Li Chenyang presented the Confucian view of the relationship between friendship and morality.

 In the discussion, Professor Chen Shengbai, Professor Shang Jianfei, Professor Zhang Yanliang and Associate Professor Wang Hanqing discussed the concept of consistency and independence of "friendship and morality" successively. Professor Chen concluded that Professor Li’s problem-oriented approach is very important because it not only makes philosophical problems not just textual ones, but also makes textual ones serve real problems. The philosophy department should follow this vision. Finally, Prof.Chen hopes to have the opportunity to invite Professor Li Chenyang to Lanzhou for offline academic exchange.