Professor Tai Youn Hwang graduated from the Department of Diplomacy at Seoul National University and received his master’s degree at the same graduate school with the thesis “The Concept of War in Hegel.” In 1991 he earned his doctorate at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, with the dissertation Domination and Labor (Herrschaft und Arbeit). In 1994 he was appointed professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Dongguk University, where he researched and taught the political philosophy and political thought of both East and West until his retirement in February 2022. He still lectures in undergraduate and graduate courses as an emeritus professor and continues to write.
For more than thirty years he has broadly explored the political philosophy of East and West, past and present, devoting himself to the study of the rise of the Western Enlightenment through the westward transmission (西遷) of Confucian philosophy, and of the founding and modernization of the United States.
His works on Confucian philosophy and East–West political philosophy include The Positivist Book of Changes (2 vols., 2008·2012), Confucius and the World (5 vols., 2011), A Hermeneutics of Emotion and Empathy (2 vols., 2014·2015), A Theory of Patchwork Civilization (2016), Confucius’s Epistemology and the Study of Changes (2018), Confucian Philosophy and the Origins of the Western Enlightenment (2 vols., 2019), The Confucius Worship and the Moralists of Early Modern Britain (2 vols., 2020·2023), The Confucius Craze and the Enlightenment Philosophy of Early Modern France (2020·2023), The Confucian Enlightenment of Early Modern Germany (2020·2023), Confucius and the Founding of America (2 vols., 2020·2023), The General Theory of Confucian Modernity (2 vols., 2021·2023), Confucius’s Philosophy of Freedom and Equality and the Unprecedented Democratic Republic (2021), The Confucian Shock and the Birth of the Western Free and Equal Society (3 vols., 2022), The Enlightenment of the Far East and the Birth of the Western Tolerant State (2022), and The Shock of the Confucian Empire and the Birth of the Western Modern State (3 vols., 2022).
Among his works translated abroad is 孔夫子與歐洲思想啟蒙 (2020), the Chinese translation published by China’s People’s Daily Press of the popular edition Confucius Awakens a Sleeping Europe (2015), which was itself drawn from the second volume of Confucius and the World (2011).
In the field of Korean political philosophy and the history of Korean political thought, his books include A Country of Regional Hegemony (1997), Constitutional Temperament and Leadership (2003), A Centrist-Reformist Political Philosophy (2008), The Origin of the Name “Republic of Korea” and the Meaning of “Minguk” (2016), The Structural Transformation of Publicness in the Joseon Period (co-authored, 2016), The Gabo Japanese Invasion and the Exile to the Russian Legation (2017), The People’s Nation, the Korean Empire (2017), The Gabjin Japanese Invasion and the People’s War (2017), The Political Thought of Korea’s Modernization (2018), Japanese Imperial Racism (co-authored, 2019·2023), Centrist Progressivism: The Road to a Happiness State (2021·2023), Constitutional Temperament: Seeing People and the World (2021·2023), The Silk Road of Korean Metal Type (2022), The Publishing Revolution of Joseon, a Nation of Books (2 vols., 2023), and The Origin of the National Title of the Republic of Korea and the Taegukgi (2023).
In the field of Western politics, he has published numerous books, including Herrschaft und Arbeit im neueren technischen Wandel (Domination and Labor amid Recent Technological Change, Peter Lang, 1992), Environmental Politics (1992), Domination and Reason (1994), A Study of the Decentralized Presidential System (co-authored, 2003), The Project of Enlightenment (2004), and A History of Modern Western Political Thought (co-authored, 2007). He has also published many papers, such as “Verschollene Eigentumsfrage (The Missing Question of Property)” (1992), “Habermas and Another Marx” (1998), and “Knowledge Society and Ecological Reason” (2007).
The author is currently devoting himself to writing two extensive works, The General Theory of Morality: A Modern Scientific Foundation of Identity-Morality and Survival-Morality (2 vols.) and The General Theory of State Transformation: From the Just State to the State of Benevolence and Righteousness (2 vols.). Through the YouTube channel “Hwang Tai Youn Academia,” recordings of his graduate seminars at Dongguk University related to the works above, filmed from 2018 to the present, have been broadcast as the [Open Graduate School] series.
— Editorial Department —