Introduction

National Taiwan University (NTU), the oldest and the premier university in Taiwan, has led the country’s higher education and academic research for many years. In view of the crisis in humanistic values and to further fulfill its vision of excellence in academia, the university considered it an imperative to establish a high-level research institution that could integrate research across its twelve colleges on the basis of a re-invention of humanistic values. The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (IHS) was hence established in October 2005 to promote fundamental scholarship and interdisciplinary integration of the pertinent fields of inquiry. The Institute serves as platform for comprehensive interchanges between the humanities and the social sciences as well as science and technology, offering ample opportunities for intercollegiate and international communications aiming at transcending the typical compartmentalization of academia and consistently producing integrated new visions. The Motto that the Institute holds is therefore “Enriching visions of culture and the humanities by thinking through dialogue.”