Professor Tran Duc Thao, a learned philosopher

Professor Tran Duc Thao was born in 1917 in Tu Son district, Bac Ninh province. Having excellently passed his baccalaureate, Tran Duc Thao went to France in 1936 for further study in order to enrol in the D’ulm Teacher Training University, which was called at that time the ‘Super University’ and enrolled only excellent students of the country. In 1943, he finished his master degree at the university with a thesis entitled ‘The Husserl Phenomenology Methodology.’ He shifted his study from phenomenology to dialectical materialism. This caused an argument between him and existentialist Jean Paul Sartre.

Professor Thao returned to Vietnam after 1951. He went to the revolutionary base in Viet Bac. After the restoration of peace, he worked at the Teacher Training University and the Hanoi University, the National Politics Publishing House. He died in 1993, when he was in France for treatment..

Professor Tran Duc Thao devoted his whole life to philosophy as a philosopher who studied and lectured on philosophy. In any situation, material and spiritual difficulties did not to prevent him from thinking of philosophy. The outstanding aspect of the professor was that he always wanted to keep pace with the world knowledge level.

Professor Thao wrote books on philosophy in Vietnamese and French. Many of his books are widely know to domestic and foreign readers like ‘Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism,’ (published in 1951) ‘Finding Original Point of Language and Consciousness’ (1973) and ‘Issues on Human Beings and a Doctrine without Human Beings’ (1988) and other books of his lectures published before and after he died. ‘Finding Original Point of Language and Consciousness’ is the most important book which won the Ho Chi Minh Prize. In his book, the professor affirmed that what distinguished human beings was that they bear consciousness. Where and when, however, human consciousness started to exist is still a big question for human kind. 

Attempting to answer this question in his book, the professor suggested two ways to study the original point of consciousness. The first way is to study gesture and language of children and the other is to study documents on prehistoric people. The two ways have supported each other and,  in each particular case, he used one of them as a prominent issue. He was able to do this because the appearance of clans always repeats in the appearance of individuals. This postulate has helped combine three individual studies of the professor into a complete work.

By VUONG LINH NAM